Takes the Boldest Turn of His Career With a Sci-Fi Elegy for the Ungrievable
The Palme d’Or winner returns to Cannes Competition with a 127-minute near-future drama starring Haruka Ayase as a mother who replaces her dead son with a humanoid robot. Neon holds US, UK and Australia rights. Sales via Gaga and Goodfellas.
There is a question that hovers over every great filmmaker’s late career: what do you do after you have made your masterpiece? For Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters and has since continued to expand his range — from Korean-language Broker to the formally audacious Monster — the answer turns out to be something nobody saw coming. Sheep in the Box is a sci-fi film, a new direction entirely for a director whose cinema has always been rooted in the textures of domestic realism. The pivot is not a gimmick. It is, if anything, the most logical extension of everything Kore-eda has ever cared about.
The synopsis is deceptively simple: in the near future, Otone and her husband Kensuke, who have lost their child, are presented with a humanoid robot that is a perfect replica of their son. What follows, across 127 meticulously constructed minutes, is not a thriller about technology gone wrong or a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence. It is a Kore-eda film: which is to say, a film about the impossible grammar of grief, about what families are willing to lie to themselves in order to survive, about the gap between the people we love and the versions of them we are capable of letting go.
The Idea That Started Everything
Kore-eda has described the genesis of the project with characteristic directness: “This project began with the idea of bringing the dead back to life using the latest technology.” In lesser hands, that premise would lead to horror or polemic. Here, it leads somewhere far more uncomfortable: tenderness. The film does not ask whether the robot is real. It asks whether it matters.
Otone Komoto, played by Haruka Ayase, works as an architect. Her husband Kensuke, played by Daigo Yamamoto, runs a construction company. The professional details are not incidental. Kore-eda has always understood that the worlds people build for a living tell us everything about the worlds they construct at home — and about what happens when those structures are forced to hold more weight than they were designed for.
A Reunion Eight Years in the Making
The film reunites Kore-eda with Haruka Ayase, who appeared in his 2015 film Our Little Sister. That earlier collaboration produced one of the quietest and most devastating performances in Kore-eda’s filmography. Here, Ayase is asked to do something categorically harder: to love something that is not alive, convincingly enough that the audience loves it too. Early footage suggests she is more than equal to the task.
Sheep in the Box is produced by Fuji Television Network, Gaga, Toho and Aoi Pro. Neon holds rights in the US, UK and Australia, having previously distributed Kore-eda’s 2022 feature Broker. Toho has set a May 29 release in Japan. International sales are handled by Gaga for Asia and North America, and by Goodfellas for the rest of the world.
A Director Who Has Never Repeated Himself
Kore-eda is one of Cannes’ most consistent presences, with no fewer than seven films selected over the years. Nobody Knows earned the Best Actor Award in 2004; Like Father, Like Son took the Jury Prize in 2013; Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or in 2018; and Monster won both the Best Screenplay Award and the Queer Palm in 2023. That track record makes him one of the most decorated directors in the festival’s history — and one of the most difficult to second-guess.
Sheep in the Box marks his first feature since Monster, and its arrival in Competition this year carries particular weight given the broader context. The jury, chaired by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, must weigh a Competition in which two previous Palme d’Or winners — Kore-eda and Romania’s Cristian Mungiu — are competing again alongside an exceptionally strong field of first-timers and veterans.
Meanwhile, Japan has been named the 2026 Marché du Film Country of Honour, the first East Asian nation to hold the title since the initiative launched in 2022, with Sheep in the Box serving as the most prominent of three Japanese films competing for the Palme d’Or this edition — alongside Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden and Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes.
It is a remarkable moment for Japanese cinema. And at its centre, characteristically, is a film not about triumph but about loss — about a box that holds something that looks like a child, and a family that must decide, day by day, whether to open it.
Sheep in the Box screens in Competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, running May 12–23, 2026. Japan release: May 29, 2026 via Toho. US/UK/Australia: Neon.