“Sheep in the Box,” the latest film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, opens with a title card informing us that we are “sometime in the not so distant future.” In this unspecified moment, Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Daigo (Kensuke Komoto) live a quiet life that looks a lot like domesticity in contemporary Japan. The couple remains haunted by the loss of their young son, Karuke (Rimu Kuwaki), who died in a botched kidnapping two years earlier.
Knowing this, a company called REbirth aggressively targets them with promotional material for their AI -powered humanoid replicas of deceased loved ones. Although Daigo is hesitant, Otone persuades her husband to order a copy of Karuke under the conditions of a free trial. Seeing an advanced technological iteration of their son may or may not bring them comfort, but it will cost them nothing to find out.
The premise sets off a familiar narrative alarm bell. The resurrection, cloning or reanimation of loved ones is almost always a portent of disaster — an early signpost in stories of hubris and tragedy that follow a mythic structure. The reanimated loved ones invariably come back wrong: disgusting, strange, suffering and often violent. Among the most influential entries in the genre are Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” and W.W. Jacobs’ oft-mimicked “The Monkey’s Paw” (which has inspired everything from “The Simpsons”“Treehouse of Horror” episodes to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”).
“Sheep in the Box” is among a wave of recent and forthcoming films to bring the technological resurrection story into the age of data-scraping and AI mimicry. Kogonada’s last film, 2021’s “After Yang ,” dealt with a family’s slowly degrading android companion. Later this year, a film version is set to release of “Klara and the Sun ,” Kazu Ishiguro’s novel about an “Artificial Friend” tasked with memorizing and recreating the behaviors of a terminally ill child.
The premise sets off a familiar narrative alarm bell.
These stories of grief and technological resurrection arrive just as the science fiction horizon is merging with reality: multiple companies now sell subscriptions for bereaved people to interact with AI chatbots that send texts, mimic voices or appear as virtual avatars of their deceased loved ones. An article on The Debrief — a publication that boosts for “frontier science and innovative technology” — describes the types of data that can be mined to create these “generative ghosts,” including “writing, voice recordings, or photographs from the deceased to create simulated conversations.” The article isn’t much concerned with the ethical questions raised by these products — most ethically pressing: Who gave who permission to claim data rights over the deceased? — and neither is “Sheep in the Box .”
The free trial allows Otone and Daigo to select the data from which REbirth will “build” their son, meaning they can tailor him to their desires as opposed to the company recreating an unbiased, holistic version. Unsurprisingly, Otone prefers a version of little Karuke that is laughing and happy. She avoids any mention of trains, since it reminds her of his violent death.
As he was tailored to be, the android Karuke is pleasant and plain, though he mysteriously knows certain things about which the parents requested ignorance, such as the entire train schedule that passes through their town. Daigo remains suspicious of the android, often calling it a Roomba in an attempt to remind himself that the product is not his son. Otone, meanwhile, grows overly attached and falls asleep on the living room floor while cradling the android.
The uncanniest element of “Sheep in the Box” has nothing to do with its android, but is its failure to develop its thematic or philosophical threads, from the nature of Karuke’s AI consciousness, to the nature of the corporate entity that pushed it on two grieving parents. At one point, Otone wonders aloud if it’s possible for artificially produced beings to have a soul, only for the film to do absolutely nothing with this meditation. In another missed opportunity, Android-Karuke muses that he is perhaps meant to be even more powerful than humans — disturbing! — only for the film to drop the question.
Then there is the film’s utter failure to interrogate or realistically depict REbirth, the mysterious company that created Karuke. After sending the android, the company falls out of the plot, as if the free subscription is endless and without any sort of strings attached. This is not how AI companies work, even in the age of ChatGPT.
The lacunae is in stark contrast to the aggressive constant-contact marketing featured in the “Black Mirror” episode “Common People,” where the company at the center of the story causes outages and glitches to ensure regular subscription upgrades. While “Common People” doesn’t deal directly with AI entities, it reckons powerfully with the exploitative upgrades that companies specialize in — especially when preying upon people in distress . The closest we have to REbirth in reality is “You, Only Virtual, a company ” that charges those “lucky” enough to get off the waitlist $499 upfront and then $29.99 per month in perpetuity for their lowest-tier plan. Despite the zigzags of Karuke’s dedication to service, one suspects the film will be welcomed by executives at Project December , Seance AI and other purveyors of AI-driven consolation technology.
Instead of examining any of this low-hanging dystopian fruit, the film retreats instead into the clichés of a conventional Great Escape adventure. After connecting in secret with other REbirth humanoid children, Karuke plots to make a new home in a remote forest. The childlike androids, with little to no explanation, take a small group of abused human children with them. How they intend to care for these human beings, who presumably must eat and bathe, is likewise ignored. The rebel army intends to build, for lack of a better descriptor, a robot nest in the treetops of a remote forest so they can reach singularity with the trees. This final communion with the natural world echoes Klara’s obsession with the sun in the forthcoming adaptation of “Klara and the Sun.” It’s strange that both stories take great pains to make ecologists of AI entities, considering the destruction of nature that AI requires as a precondition of its existence.
It’s disheartening to see this endorsement of soulless pseudo-resurrection.
The film portrays Otone’s decision to help Karuke in his escape as the result of a healthy urge to release that which she loves most. The choice can also be
“Sheep in the Box” embraces the idea that human loved ones exist to perform something for us — emotional stability and comfort in this case, perhaps sex in another (interestingly enough, one of Kore-eda’s more thoughtful films on sentience is “Air Doll,” a film about a sex-doll-turned-human) — and that AI companies can or will soon be able to do it just as well. The film is not bothered by the fact that Otone has to send her dead son’s data to an unknown company with unknown intentions. What matters is her comfort and closure, and that it is delivered intact and on time.
All of this is enough to make you miss the brutal violence and instant regret of older iterations of the “came back wrong” trope. The moral of such stories used to be clear: There is social and spiritual value in letting the dead rest, and in trusting — even in the throes of the most desperate grief — that there is a purpose and meaning in the life cycle.
It’s disheartening to see this endorsement of soulless pseudo-resurrection and blind thumb-sucking comfort from a deeply humanistic director like Kore-eda. Something as complex, human and necessary as grief should not be “handled” — which is to say, dopamine-numbed — by the same tech developers who encourage us to procure groceries from our phone and upload every moment of our lives to addictive, ever-ravenous for-profit algorithms. “ Sheep in the Box” seems to hope that “sometime in the not so distant future” we can place an order to circumvent not only the latter stages of grief, but anything that gives us even a mild case of the blues. No subscription required.
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Comfort and Closure at What Cost?
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