The quietness of Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s movies is a bit misleading; he’s the kind of artist who can create emotional earthquakes from a mere glance. His films, all of them beautifully subtle, heartbreaking yet often gently uplifting stories about children and families, include “Nobody Knows,” “Our Little Sister,” “Shoplifters,” “Like Father Like Son” and the recent Netflix series “Asura.” “Sheep in the Box,” his latest, has all the usual Kore-eda hallmarks, plus a touch of science fiction (and nothing whatsoever about sheep; the title’s a reference to a passage in “The Little Prince”). It’s perhaps not his finest outing — the story seems to lose its way a bit in the final act — but even second-rate Kore-eda is still a fascinating journey.

“Sheep in the Box” is the story of a grieving couple, Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), struggling to move forward after the loss of their 7-year-old only child, Kakeru. One day, soft-voiced Otone learns of a company called REbirth, which will supply bereaved families with a humanoid engineered to exactly resemble their lost loved one. Despite her husband’s reluctance — “They’re hyenas cashing in on misfortune!” Kensuke says of the business — Otone will do anything to see her son again, and soon a sweet-faced, shiny-haired little boy robot (Rimu Kuwaki) has arrived in their home, simultaneously exactly like Kakeru and not like him at all. He has everything their son once had, except a soul.

It’s a plot that shares some DNA with Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel “Klara and the Sun” (itself being adapted for a feature film, coming later this year), and it’s rich emotional territory for Kore-eda, who makes the film less a parable about technology but a meditation on grief and loss and parental love, on how the heart can will itself to see something that isn’t there. Otone looks at “Kakeru” as if he’s nourishment she needs to devour, ignoring Kensuke’s reluctance (“I’m not your papa. Call me Mister,” he insists) and the scorn of her own mother, who calls him “that thing.” There’s a long moment — actually more than one — where she simply stares at him, and you see through her gaze the boy that was once her world. At one point, she reads to him from “The Little Prince,” words that sum up the movie eloquently: “You can’t see the things that really matter.”

———

'SHEEP IN THE BOX'

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for thematic material, some language, smoking and a brief bloody image)

Running time: 2:06

How to watch: In theaters nationwide July 31

———

©2026 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.