Director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d'Or for Shoplifters, has released a new science-fiction drama, Sheep in the Box, which imagines artificial intelligence in a less dystopian light than most films in the genre. The story follows parents who lose their young son in an accident and are offered a robotic double, indistinguishable from a human, built from an AI company's technology. The film matters as a rare mainstream take suggesting AI could serve as a tool for processing grief rather than purely as a threat, at a time when AI is increasingly embedded in everyday life.

In an interview with The Verge at Neon's offices ahead of the film's US debut, Kore-eda explained he consulted a robotics expert while writing the script, who told him cloned humans were more plausible than humanoid robots because of overheating issues, shaping the film's premise. Grief remains a recurring theme across his filmography, tracing back to his 1995 debut Maborosi, which drew on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's writing on grief processing; Kore-eda noted that grief does not follow a linear path and varies from person to person. He also discussed how the film's robotic son, Kakeru, is built from memories preselected by his parents, raising questions about whether data can ever truly replicate lived memory, and revealed he tested the script by running it through ChatGPT.