Welcome to the first of what will be 22 installments to a series I'm calling 'Evaluating Cannes' Competition', where I will be going through and reviewing each of the 22 films that played in competition for the right to win the Palme d'Or at this year's, 2026, Cannes Film Festival. And maybe, by the start of next Cannes, I will have a winner selected, and the Festival will be so impressed with my taste that I'll be invited to be Jury President! That'll be the day ...
The first film to premiere in the United States out of the festival's competition field is Hirokazu Kore-eda's 'Sheep in the Box'. Kore-eda's return to feature-filmmaking after the 2023 film 'Monster' is a plot one could certainly expect from the writer/director as he follows a couple dealing with the loss and grief around the death (and, ultimately, we learn, traumatic disappearance) of their seven-year-old son. They attempt to fill this void through a humanoid version of "him".
Panned out of the festival (it was the second-lowest rated film on the ScreenDaily Cannes Jury Grid at a 1.3/4 average) I entered the theater with caution, and left feeling tepid, but not completely underwhelmed by the film. Kore-eda's trademark humanistic touch is there, but it's hidden under an intentional veneer of postmodern artificiality, as well as a presumably unintentional serious gulf between the viewer and our characters.
Some of Kore-eda's distance is, assuredly, intended between us and our husband and wife leads (Otone, played by Haruka Ayase, and Kensuke, played by Daigo Yamamoto). Kore-eda lets some information slow-drip out in the context of the film, like the circumstances of the real Kakeru's death. The pair's relationship is physically distant, too, an episode of Otone dry shampooing Kensuke's hair the first real moment of intimacy, physical, and, really, emotional, coming well into the second hour of the film.
Kore-eda plays in the elemental, with water and earth both featuring prominently. The coloring of the film matches this, and some of the sterile interiors combine with frequent shots of trees (and more than one from a vantage point of looking down) to add a bit of 'air' in the picture. In the era of AI data centers and the debate around their water and electricity usage (happening in my backyard of Ann Arbor/Saline as I type), it's interesting that Kore-eda's "Roombas" cannot touch the stuff. The ending sequence centers around a metaphor that can be best described by the AI Kakeru: "combin[ing] trees and us," also emphasizing a detachment from the natural world.
The lens he views our humanoids isn't inherently pro-AI, though a cynic may wrongly view it this way, but rather that, like us humans, these humanoids deal with their own issues, just as the adaptation of various technologies, as a whole, brings about necessary questions for mankind. In this way, the technology is metaphorical, though Kore-eda taps into anxieties like AIs 'going rogue' to present detachment between man and machine. As Kore-eda's ending makes clear, his answer to this problem of finding harmony comes when we look to nature and harmonize between the technological realm and the flora and fauna of the "real" world.
This central detachment comes through the environment of our lead couple in both the natural and domestic worlds. Otone and Kensuke are a land development team working on a European-post-modern style house on a plot of land with woods freshly cleared for it to be built upon. Sure enough, the couple for whom the house is being built, and whose mother/in-law is paying for it, deem the design "too modern", as if from an EU country. The couple's own home is stunning, 'woods mixed with glass' as Otone likes it, with centered around a courtyard of stone, grass, and a few trees, and creamy tones. Yet, for the two bereaved still deep in grief, it feels like far too much. Otone is also a clear 'early adapter' to tech: the film opens with her receiving a package from a drone delivery service, and she uses augmented reality in addition to her miniature figures to design and show housing plans. So, it is no wonder that the answer to their detachment is to look towards technology for the cure.
From a narrative sense, this is not one of Kore-eda's strongest. Favorite tropes of the director -- the most prominent being found family -- play without enough build or heart behind them. The humanoids and their sympathizers are woefully underwritten, and ideas of the struggle to understand one's self feel muted at best and all-too-frequently does it feel like time wasted. Kore-eda opens several ideas in the hearts of the protagonist pair (for instance: both Otone and Kensuke have bouts of loving AI Kakeru and wanting to give him back) but very little comes to a satisfying conclusion with either of the two. The incorporation of some of the light sci-fi elements, including the almost cultish, young humanoid group, to go along with adding Otone's mother to the family house, and those tensions that come with that, and her feelings about being "not cut out for motherhood", are poorly established or developed too late, and barely. Characters stay rather stagnant, and somewhat fantastically are connected to a core truth at the conclusion of the film.
A core idea of Kore-eda's for Sheep in the Box, according to an interview he did with Variety, is a quote said in the film: "Who do the dead belong to?" I question if Kore-eda was able to focus on this in a substantive way. Kore-eda explores who *we* belong to, as well, but I would hazard a guess that Kore-eda would have been able to get more mileage out of this concept if he narrowed in on the lead couple's marraige, the 'MacGuffin' of AI Kakeru, and the detachments that ebb and flow through work and personal life while grieving. Instead of presenting a more focused look at this hyper-modern life, where companies, as opposed to simple targeted ads, send offers of a complementary year of a humanoid that looks and talks like your dead child, Kore-eda perhaps gets lost in the trees.
Final Rating: 2/5
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No footage in the video embedded into this blog post is my own, and I claim no ownership or credit over it. All rights reserved to Hirokazu Kore-eda (intellectual property), Neon (distribution and trailer ownership rights), and the copyright holders of 'Sheep in the Box': © 2026 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK/GAGA CORPORATION/TOHO/AOI Pro. The embedded YouTube video is not my own. This non-commercial blog plot is intended for critical and educational purposes and my usage of any material I do not own or have license to rights should be considered 'Fair Use' under Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act.
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