by Adrian Nguyen
Worth: $7.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Haruka Ayase, Daigo Yamamoto, Rimu Kuwaki
Intro:
Ryuto Kondo’s cinematography is the best thing about Sheep in the Box, exhibiting more personality than any of the actors.
A departure from some of his more dramatic works – Shoplifters, Like Father Like Son, and Monster – Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest effort, Sheep in the Box, is a featherweight checklist of cliches in its depiction of AI and the existential questions that arise from it. It’s not that the film does not possess many valid ideas, like whether an AI-powered child could compensate for parental grief, whether they are conscious, and embody similar traits as humans. This has already been better executed in films such as AI: Artificial Intelligence, Her, or Never Let Me Go. The biggest problem with the film is its large emotional restraint, which hampers any ambition or possible epiphany.
Set in a distant future, where 3000 robots reside in Japan, a couple adopts a humanoid robot named Kakeru, who can replicate memories of their dead son, killed in a hit-and-run accident. Once the narrative starts to unravel, the film doesn’t expand on the concepts it has already set up. The base feels fragile, with plot points unfinished, like whether the central couple – Otone, an architect, and Kensuke, a carpenter – can experience emotional closure by replacing their child with another one.
The characters are fundamentally bland, and it’s not helped by actors Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto, who seem uninterested in elevating the pitfalls of the screenplay they’re given by Kore-eda. Yamamoto, who carries the comic relief in what is an overall serious film, does not add to the film. Also not helping is a cutesy but cloying score that paints the movie as a low-budget sci-fi. Rimu Kuwaki as the robot child Kakeru, like his adult peers, leaves his character one-dimensional. His existence on this earth and what it means to be here are barely given any development.
Ryuto Kondo’s cinematography is the best thing about Sheep in the Box, exhibiting more personality than any of the actors. What is baffling here is that the prolific Kore-eda, who has repeatedly proven to get the best out of his cast and touching on sentimental themes without being saccharine, managed to achieve the opposite here.
