Though it is unusual for him, Sheep in the Box is not the first time that Hirokazu Kore-eda has dabbled in the realm of speculative fiction. His second narrative feature, After Life , entertained a curious concept on the space between life and death and the figures who ferry along souls about to rest. A little later he made Air Doll , a Pinocchio story about a sex doll that comes to life -but is much more innocent than that sounds. Sheep in the Box feels like a continuation of the themes touched on in Air Doll especially, specifically its depiction of an artificial intelligence looking for meaning in their existence. The film it resembles much more potently though is Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence -down to having roughly the same premise as its starting point. As a science-fiction device, A.I. itself does not have the same speculative innocence that it once did, and stories about the humanity of androids or artificially intelligent beings ring just a little differe...
The long opening scene of The Beloved plays out almost exactly like a similar early scene in Sentimental Value . An acclaimed and accomplished film director is meeting for lunch with his estranged daughter, who is an actress, hoping to persuade her to star in his next movie. There is even a beat where he compliments her recent television work whilst dismissing the medium itself. They are practically the same scene. But director Rodrigo Sorogoyen has different intentions than Joachim Trier -he lets the scene drag out longer, shoots it only in close-up parallel shots of the actors partly obscured by the head of whoever the shoulder angle is attached to. And it is bristling with a very different kind of tension, more hostile than wounded in the trauma of the relationship. Sentimental Value , as its title implied, was deeply heartfelt and emotional. There is no sentiment to The Beloved . Where Trier set his drama in the world of filmmaking as a way of commenting on and emphasizing the art...