‘Sheep in the Box’ Trailer: Hirokazu Koreeda Makes a Plea for Imagination in the AI Age with Sci-Fi Grief Drama

Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as the nucleus of all debate in the entertainment industry — and it’s an issue that is going to define the forthcoming awards season. Amazon dropped Luca Guadagnino’s allegedly scathing Sam Altman drama “Artificial” amid the company’s lucrative partnership with OpenAI, and A24 just partnered with Google DeepMind for “research purposes.” Is there any entertainment company untouched by AI’s tendrils?

All the latest news makes Hirokazu Koreeda‘s 2026 Cannes entry “Sheep in the Box” all the more topical in its earnest plea for human imagination over robotic replication. While Japan is more likely to go with Cannes double Best Actress winner “All of a Sudden” (from Oscar nominee Ryusuke Hamaguchi) for its Best International Feature Oscar entry, Koreeda’s latest feature speaks urgently to questions rumbling around all our heads right now. Watch the trailer below.

It’s set in a recognizably near-future, where a grieving couple who have recently lost their son in a tragic accident decides to adopt a humanoid child — one that looks and sounds the same as their dead child. “Shoplifters” and “After Life” director Koreeda wrote and directed the film, with the cast including Daigo, Kuwaki Rimu, and Haruka Ayase.

Audiences expecting a traditional artificial-intelligence dystopia in “Sheep in the Box” are instead met with a plaintive grief drama tinged with sci-fi elements familiar to the present. “A lot of people were expecting some AI dystopian, controlled-by-robots story and that they are surprised that it doesn’t end that way, for better or worse,” Koreeda told IndieWire at Cannes.

The film’s title references Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved classic book “The Little Prince,” and Koreeda was inspired to write and direct the film after reading an article about a Chinese company attempting to use generative AI to bring back the dead.

Koreeda’s sprawling family drama “Shoplifters” earned a Best International Feature Oscar nomination in 2019. His films frequently unfold from the perspective of children, but here, we see how unsettled and uncomfortable some adults are toward the humanoid child, whose perspective only starts to emerge toward the end of the movie. “I didn’t tell him to act like a robot, but I directed the adults in a way that they would find that uncomfortable,” Koreeda said of directing the child actor, Rimu Kuwaki.

Neon opens “Sheep in the Box” in New York City and Los Angeles starting Friday, July 24, with more dates to follow.