Sheep in the Box frames AI as a test of grief and family

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film, Sheep in the Box, uses a near-future AI premise to tell a story about bereavement, The Verge reported in an interview with the director. The film matters because it treats artificial intelligence less as a doomsday machine than as a tool that forces a family to face what loss has done to them.

According to The Verge, the sci-fi drama centers on parents whose seven-year-old son dies in a freak accident. The boy is described as curious and close to his family, with a love of baseball and time with friends.

In the world Kore-eda has built, The Verge reported, an AI company offers the parents a way to see their child again: a robotic duplicate that appears indistinguishable from a human being. The premise places a private tragedy inside a wider debate about how far technology should go in simulating the dead.

Kore-eda is best known internationally for Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or in 2018, The Verge noted. His new film extends a recurring concern in his work: how families live with absence and how grief reshapes ordinary life.

The Verge reported that Kore-eda spoke with a robotics expert while writing the script. Kore-eda said the expert told him that overheating problems meant “we would sooner have clones of humans than we would humanoid robots.”

That exchange appears to have shaped the film’s tension between emotional possibility and technical limits. According to The Verge, Kore-eda was aware that a story like this may have seemed remote only a few years ago, while the rapid spread of AI now makes the idea feel closer to current life.

The film’s robot-child device could suggest a thriller about machines replacing people. The Verge’s account instead describes Sheep in the Box as a human-centered drama in which the science fiction frame serves the story of a family coping with the death of a child.

The Verge characterized the film as a work about whether AI might help people process grief, or whether it might complicate that process. Kore-eda’s premise leaves the family facing a painful question without turning the technology itself into the only subject.

This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.