Because Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda makes humanistic family dramas – and makes them as well as anybody – it isn’t usually possible to call his work derivative of other films or directors. Getting into higher concept territory may change some of that calculation. For his latest in a long succession of MIFF appearances, including most recently Monster in 2023, Kore-eda has strayed a bit outside of his comfort zone of realistic films set in the present day. In Sheep in the Box, he offers up a world where families can replace a lost child with an AI-powered android substitute, who is almost as good as the real thing. Just don’t try to feed them or put them in the bath.

If this sounds like Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, well yes, it is pretty much exactly that, only with fewer robot gigolos played by Jude Law. To be sure, nothing about Kore-eda’s style or colour palette resembles that of Spielberg. But even when lending his own tender brand of empathy to the story, Kore-eda still feels like he’s reheating someone else’s ideas, and not just Spielberg’s, which were really Stanley Kubrick’s. The potential role of manufactured loved ones in our lives, the question of whether they have a soul and the capacity to love … these are among the more common themes in a recent spate of films inspired by our real-world grappling with the implications of AI.

Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) lost their young son Kakeru in a hit-and-run car accident that occurred when he was walking home alone, each blaming themselves for a dereliction of duty that put Kakeru in the path of that vehicle. A targeted advertisement makes them aware of a company called REbirth, which will conjure a replacement for the lost child from family photos and videos. The child should be indistinguishable from other children, except for the glowing blue on/off switch on the back of the neck, and little details like going into automatic shutoff mode if the artificial child strays too far from its parent.

She wants to jump in. He’s more sceptical, wondering if this new presence in their home is anything different from a Roomba. These attitudes are not likely to remain fixed, and the reactions of extended family also factor into the equation. While generally quite convincing, Kakeru does show certain unusual tendencies, and who’s that older child who has called him over at the edge of the park before disappearing?

A few mild gestures at intrigue notwithstanding, it’s not Kore-eda’s style to delve too deeply into the dystopic side of AI – which is its far more common incarnation in recent movies. No, the concerns here are closer to those explored in his underrated masterpiece Like Father, Like Son (2013), in which two families belatedly learn their children were switched in the hospital, meaning they’ve been raising the other’s biological son. Where that movie hit on all the feels, this one seems more to be parroting those feels, a bit like AI itself. And this is no shade on the performances of Ayase and Yamamoto, who do each have moments with this replacement Kakeru that should prompt a similar response in us.

Except those moments don’t have that impact. It might be as simple as the fact that we never knew the original Kakeru, so their grief related to him is more like a story told to us second hand. And if we’re going to continue our comparison to the 25-year-old AI, the child actor Rimu Kuwaki does not make the same play for our emotions as Haley Joel Osment did, either intentionally or unintentionally opting for the flatter affect of a robot. So while he’s stimulating in them feelings of guilt and despair, in us he’s stimulating … pretty much nothing.

Sheep in the Box worsens some of its more mawkish tendencies by engaging in an elongated finale that involves other AI children, who possess an equally small share of our viewer sympathies. Kore-eda’s film clocks in at just more than two hours, and the plot itself doesn’t warrant that length. If this is, indeed, a bit of a simulacrum of the movies Kore-eda does best, that still means it lands often enough to be worth seeing. Kore-eda’s humanism is, after all, the antidote the world needs against the encroaching deadening effect of machine intelligence. Maybe actually making a movie about that machine intelligence hindered some of his own abilities.

 

Sheep in the Box has two more MIFF screenings, this Sunday at 10 a.m. at The Forum, and next Sunday at 4:30 at Hoyts Melbourne Central. Tickets can be purchased here.