Kore-eda explores humanity through AI in Cannes competition

Hirokazu Kore-eda arrived at Cannes this year with something unexpected: a science fiction film. The Japanese director, long known for his tender excavations of family pain and the small humiliations of ordinary life, premiered "Sheep in the Box" on Saturday with a story set in the near future, populated by artificial humanoids and the people who grieve them.

The film opens with Otone and Kensuko, a couple still raw from losing their son Kakeru two years earlier in a tragic accident. A drone arrives at their door with a promotional hologram—an advertisement for a product that promises to ease their suffering. A company now manufactures humanoids, exact physical replicas built from DNA samples of the deceased, designed to help families process their loss. The couple decides to try. The company offers free samples in exchange for data: information gathered by the robot as it lives alongside them, observations that will be fed back into the system to improve future models. It reads like the terms of service buried in any smartphone app or AI tool offered by a major technology firm today.

The synthetic Kakeru arrives physically identical to the boy they lost, but there is an immediate difference. This version asks questions constantly. It watches the household, learning incrementally how to behave, how to fit into the rhythms of a family that is no longer whole. Living with him surfaces everything the parents have been carrying: the fracture between Otone and her own mother, the guilt that has calcified inside Kensuko since the accident. Kore-eda uses the premise to examine what he has spent his career studying—grief, death, trauma, the fragile architecture of human connection, the strange beauty of simply being alive.

But there is also a critique woven through the minimalist, almost cozy visual language. The film suggests a society so driven by consumption that it has convinced itself every wound can be purchased away, every loss reversed. It has trained people to reject the basic textures of human experience: frustration, failure, the acceptance that some things cannot be fixed. The humanoid becomes a mirror for this hunger—the desire to choose always, to control always, to never sit with what cannot be changed.

On the same day, another film entered the competition for the festival's highest prize. "The Beloved," directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and starring Javier Bardem, tells a different kind of family story. Bardem plays a film director living in New York who returns to Spain to shoot a movie. He casts his daughter Emilia in the lead role. They have not spoken in thirteen years. Their first conversation on screen is deeply uncomfortable—Emilia is an adult woman, but she still carries the weight of his absence, and worse, the weight of his presence during the years they did share. She has only bad memories.

Esteban, Bardem's character, is self-absorbed and turns cruel when challenged, though guilt gnaws at him for the years he was not there. The film stays close to both their faces, the camera intimate and unforgiving, capturing not just what they say but the small movements of shame and anger and longing. Through their story, Sorogoyen examines the gender imbalance that persists behind the camera in cinema—not always the spectacular violence of the MeToo moment, but the quieter asymmetries. The way a director might shout at an actress on set and call it direction. The way a woman might abandon her own career to raise a child while her partner becomes celebrated. Emilia reveals to a colleague that her mother was an actress in one of Esteban's films, that she left the industry when she became pregnant, that she gave up everything while he ascended.