Can a robot assuage a family’s grief?

The loss of a child is serious business, but director Hirokazu Kore-eda treats the subject gently in Sheep in the Box, a fable bolstered by a touch of sci-fi. Kore-eda's screenplay involves a humanoid, a robot child that enters the movie to ease the pain of two grieving parents (Daigo Yamamoto and Haruka Ayase). A company called Rebirth contacts the grieving couple. The company creates an exact replica of their late son Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), a humanoid that's been programmed to look, sound, and act like the seven-year-old child they lost. Kore-eda who won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 for Shoplifters, adds idiosyncratic touches to a fable that sits on the edge of formula, never quite submitting to it but not finding a strikingly fresh alternative either. Not surprisingly, these parents -- one a carpenter, the other an architect -- run into problems when this robot boy arrives in their lives; the presence of the replacement child forces them to consider the grief…