Look, everyone! Another sad robot movie! Seriously, what is in the water these days? We don’t mean to slander the great Hirokazu Kore-eda, who makes weepies so tender-hearted and brutal they’d make even the most bitter cynic regret their attitude, and whose latest picture, Sheep in the Box, covers similar territory. But come on, guys. The AI rhetoric can’t be potent enough for every director to line up to riff on Spielberg’s A.I. These features are going to wind up like The Net and Hackers in twenty years, and they’re all going to cover the same ground that Charlie Brooker did so well before Black Mirror moved to Netflix and went to shit.
But before we start setting the over and under on exactly when the bubble pops and everyone realizes that “AI” is just SmarterChild if it really liked destroying communities with data centers and making programming worse, we’ll be sure to appreciate what looks like another gorgeous work from Kore-eda. Some things are Better Offline, like seeing a new movie from one of Japan’s master filmmakers at your local arthouse. NEON dropped a trailer for the project earlier on Tuesday, and, man, get those tissues ready before Sam Altman decides he needs every Kleenex in the hemisphere and makes your average box cost $400.
Take a look:
Here’s a brief synopsis for Sheep in the Box:
“In the near future, Otone and Kensuke, a grieving couple who have lost their son, take into their lives a humanoid identical to their late child.”
Sheep in the Box (yeah yeeauh) hits theaters on July 24. This one didn’t get the best reception coming out of Cannes, but hey, they’ve been wrong before, and they’ll be wrong again—just like the biggest venture capital firms. At least critics don’t cause economic crises!