Kore-eda's 'Sheep in the Box' explores grief through an AI-powered lens

Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film, Sheep in the Box, begins with an unbearable premise: a young child dies in an accident, and his parents gain access to a technology that can return him as a near-perfect robotic replica. It's a thought experiment that sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI anxieties and deeply human heartbreak—and for the acclaimed director, it offered a new way to examine themes of loss that have haunted his entire body of work.

The film, which arrives in US theaters on July 24, extends Kore-eda's long engagement with how people navigate and survive grief. Rather than taking a cautionary dystopian stance, he uses the speculative premise to ask softer questions: How might technology reshape the shape of mourning? What happens to memory when it becomes data?

A Fresh Lens on an Old Theme#

Kore-eda, who won the Palme d'Or in 2018 for Shoplifters, has spent decades exploring loss through cinema. Before making Sheep in the Box, he consulted with robotics experts while drafting the screenplay, seeking technical grounding for his fictional world. One conversation proved particularly eye-opening. Engineers explained that heat generation from humanoid robots' movement and processing would be nearly impossible to manage—so much so that human cloning might be a more plausible near-future reality than lifelike androids. That revelation unsettled Kore-eda more than any robot ever could.

The film sidesteps this engineering hurdle by giving its robots independence from physical needs—they require no food or water. But this creative choice carries deeper meaning. The director explained that once memory is extracted from our bodies and reconstituted as data, it becomes something fundamentally different from what humans experience. Preselected memories fed into a machine lack the unpredictable emotional texture of genuine recollection.

AI, Grief, and Real-World Precedent#

Kore-eda's interest in this concept wasn't abstract. In recent years, Japan has seen AI-powered recreations of deceased public figures performing new songs; South Korea experienced a mother grieving her young daughter through an AI reconstruction; and China has spawned businesses dedicated to digitally resurrecting the dead. These weren't sci-fi premises—they were happening now. The director wanted to examine how these technologies might alter the emotional shape of mourning, for better and worse.

Yet he remains skeptical of AI's actual utility in his own creative life. When he fed the Sheep in the Box script to ChatGPT for feedback, the system offered generic praise and—after learning his name—predicted he'd land in Cannes' competition section (he did). But the exchange felt hollow. "There's no humanness in the background to this exchange," he reflected, "which is what makes it mostly unattractive to me."