The sci-fi movie that imagines AI isn’t so dystopian after all
The Verge Robyn Kanner
A new Kore-eda film imagines grieving parents replacing their dead son with a lifelike robot double. Real robotics experts told him overheating makes that harder than human cloning.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Robyn Kanner — read the original for the full story.
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Hirokazu Kore-eda, the director behind Shoplifters, has a new film called Sheep in the Box, and it's built around a premise that sounds like tomorrow's headline rather than fiction: a couple loses their seven-year-old son in an accident, and an AI company offers to bring him back as a robotic double indistinguishable from a human. It's a grim setup for a director whose whole career, going back to his debut feature Maborosi, has circled around how people process loss.
What's striking is how much research sits underneath the sci-fi premise. Kore-eda consulted a robotics expert while writing, and the answer he got back reshaped the film's internal logic. Humanoid robots, he was told, generate too much heat from smooth movement and constant processing to be practical any time soon. The expert's actual prediction was darker: human cloning would arrive before convincing humanoid robots do. Kore-eda kept the humanoid premise anyway, deciding the robots in his film simply don't consume resources like food or water, a choice he made purely to clear the plot obstacle, not because he thinks it's realistic.
The grief-tech angle isn't invented from nothing either. Kore-eda points to real cases that seeded the idea, including a deceased Japanese singer recreated through AI to perform a new song, and a South Korean case where a young girl who died was recreated to help her parents grieve. He also describes AI-driven memorial businesses emerging in places like China. What interests him isn't the technology itself so much as how it might reshape grief, for better and worse, especially in a story about a married couple trying to rebuild family life around an artificial stand-in for their son.
He's just as unsentimental about AI in his own process. Kore-eda ran his script through ChatGPT for feedback, and got responses that shifted from predicting a spot in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section to predicting a place in the main competition, once his producer mentioned who the director actually was. He landed in competition, so the tool wasn't wrong, but he shrugs it off as advice any person could have given, calling the exchange fundamentally lacking in humanness.
His sharper worry is about production itself. He describes driving scenes now shot in studios with composited backgrounds instead of on real roads, and expects stunt work to keep sliding toward AI and VFX. Kore-eda says he plans to stop writing scenes that lean on that kind of compositing, framing the broader shift toward productivity on set as something closer to the opposite of creativity than an upgrade to it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The most telling detail here isn't the robot-son premise, it's Kore-eda calmly admitting that ChatGPT's script notes were something any person could have offered, then still noting he got into competition anyway. That's the AI hype cycle in miniature: a tool confidently forecasting outcomes, adding nothing a human couldn't, and getting credited as insightful anyway. His real alarm, about driving scenes moving into studios and stunt work drifting toward VFX, deserves more attention than the sci-fi premise gets, because that's the part already happening, not the part dressed up as fiction.
Read more about this at: The Verge