‘Sheep in the Box’ review: A married couple adopts a robot copy of their dead son in Hirokazu Koreeda’s emotionally stilted riff on ‘AI’

A masterful sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda tampering with a film as soul-crushing as Steven Spielberg’s “AI Artificial Intelligence” sounds like a surefire recipe for the tearjerker of the year, so I was surprised to find that “Sheep in the Box” is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the “Monster” author has ever made.

In a way, this is intentional, as the original script’s two main characters – a married couple in their forties in sunny, near-future Kamakura – lose their place in the grieving process after adopting an AI-controlled humanoid modeled after their dead seven-year-old son. But unlike “After Life,” in which Koreeda previously explored the lasting effects of memory, or the little-seen “Air Doll,” in which he pondered the potential consciousness of an inflatable sex toy, or even “Like Father, Like Son,” in which he detailed the complications of exchanging one child for another, “Sheep in the…”