'Who Does the Dead Belong To?' — Kore-eda's Question for the AI Age

Otone (played by Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke (played by Daigo) have been living with the grief of losing their 7-year-old son buried deep in their hearts — until a humanoid robot named Kakeru (played by Kuwaki Rimu) appears. Otone welcomes Kakeru, who looks exactly like her late son, as though her child has returned. Kensuke, however, cannot bring himself to accept a robot wearing his son's face as a member of the family.

Even so, warmth returns to the home with Kakeru's arrival. A smile Otone had long lost reappears on her face, and Kensuke, too, cautiously begins to open his heart to Kakeru. The one thing that does not change, however, is that Kakeru is still a robot.

As time passes, the couple begins to notice ways in which Kakeru differs from their late son — in appearance and behavior alike. They press him with rebukes: "A human wouldn't act like that" and "Kakeru would never do such a thing." Meanwhile, Kakeru finds himself drawn to humanoid companions who have no wish to remain mere stand-ins for a human past. A family fractures under spreading tension; humanoid robots yearn for freedom. Can they hold together within the walls of a home? This is director Kore-eda Hirokazu's "Sheep in the Box."

The Korea Herald met Kore-eda at the Seoul offices of NEW in Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam-gu, where he had come to promote the film. It was his first visit to Korea in a year, following last year's special retrospective "25 Years with Kore-eda" at Cinecube. Kuwaki Rimu, who beat 200-to-1 odds to win the role of the humanoid Kakeru, joined the director for the interview.

Kore-eda first encountered Kuwaki through the audition for the role of Kakeru. He said he felt an immediate certainty: "Without this child, Kakeru simply wouldn't work." True to the director's instinct, Kuwaki delivers a flawless performance as Kakeru — a humanoid who looks human but lacks something of human warmth.

The narrative Kore-eda crafted about the coexistence of humans and humanoid robots in a near future he imagined "10 years from now" gains full persuasive force through Kuwaki's performance.

A performance that is almost impossible to believe came from someone with no prior acting experience is largely the result of Kuwaki's own invention. On set, the only direction the director gave him was to blink as little as possible.

"Director Kore-eda didn't give me any specific instructions about how to act like a robot. The thing he said most often was, 'Just be yourself.' I acted with that in mind — that I had to be myself." (Kuwaki)

Kore-eda Hirokazu is one of Japan's most celebrated directors. He won the Palme d'Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival in 2018 for "Shoplifters." "Sheep in the Box," which competed in the main competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is his 10th film invited to Cannes and his eighth in competition.

For Kuwaki, the debut film he will carry for the rest of his life bears the name of a master — yet he laughed and said, "I never really thought of the director as someone extraordinary."

"I only thought of him as a great director. Actually working with him, I felt he was warm and attentive to his actors." (Kuwaki) That attentiveness was on display during the interview itself: Kore-eda sat beside Kuwaki throughout, and every time the young actor paused to think over an answer, the director watched with the quiet focus of someone whose own words were at stake.

Kore-eda's inspiration for writing the screenplay came when he learned of a business in China that uses generative AI to resurrect the dead. He made the film by asking himself the question — which also appears as a line of dialogue — "Who does a dead person belong to?"

The film features Otone and Kensuke alongside others who have brought back a child lost too suddenly as a robot, seeking comfort by saying the words they never got to say. Kore-eda empathizes deeply with the grief of loss, yet he turns a sharp, questioning eye on this particular mode of human healing. In his view, humanoid robots given the names of dead children are closer to a product of human selfishness.

"I began to feel an ethical unease about people reviving the dead however they please, simply to ease their own hearts. I also started to wonder whether relying too heavily on technology might halt the process of truly healing from grief. The dead should belong to the dead. I believe there must come a point where humans draw a line under their use of such technology." (Kore-eda)

For many years, Kore-eda has explored and expanded the meaning of community, with family at its center. "Nobody Knows" (2004) portrayed abandoned children forming a "discarded family" of their own; "Shoplifters" (2018) followed people with no legal or blood ties who chose one another and became a family. "Like Father, Like Son" (2013) argued that family is shaped not by bloodline alone but by shared time and relationship.

In "Sheep in the Box," he pushes the concept of family one step further. The character who speaks the word "family" in the film is none other than Kakeru. Humanoid robots born of human selfishness and then abandoned by human hands band together and build a new community deep in a forest — a community that also includes humans who have suffered abuse at other humans' hands. Kakeru calls them his family and his home.

Kore-eda described the arc as "a development that imagines a child growing up and forming a family not with parents but with other kinds of beings."

"I imagined the humanoid robots creating a new community — one that would include humans, machines and the forest itself. If only humanoid robots lived in the forest, it might look like nothing more than a division between humans and machines, so I wanted to show that many different kinds of beings could live together. The concept of family newly created through Kakeru clearly goes beyond what we already know." (Kore-eda)