Hirokazu Koreeda’s film ‘Kakeru’ explores the replacement of a son with an android to examine the impact of technology on our relationships and our avoidance of pain. The filmmaker warns that techniques aimed at fulfilling desire destroy the authenticity of life and distort both love and the meaning of suffering. Thus, the artificial “resurrection” of a loved one sells a fictitious idea of ​​overcoming death, hindering the natural grieving process, falsifying reality, and stripping existence of a genuinely human morality.

The story delves into the private lives of Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a couple devastated two years after the tragic accident that took the life of their young son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). Exposed to a grief in which they shy away from acknowledging their suffering as a natural expression of the love they felt for him, the couple decides to accept an offer from REbirth . This technology corporation offers the possibility of renting a humanoid capable of reproducing the appearance and personality of their deceased son using videos, memories, and materials provided by the parents themselves. Generative Artificial Intelligence and robotics engineering combine to build a technical replica of Kakeru that recreates his gestures and preferences with hyperrealistic detail, aiming to ease the parents’ pain.

The replacement comes with strict restrictions: the android feels nothing, cannot eat or get wet, has a tracking microchip, requires overnight charging to regain its autonomy, and is programmed only to be adorable and obey adults. Despite all this, these barriers do not diminish Otone’s joy. She experiences the arrival of this technological resurrection as a true return of her son, a joy she thought extinguished, one that soothes the emptiness of his absence. Her reaction contrasts sharply with Kensuke’s skepticism toward the artificial being. The husband initially resists forming a bond with a device programmed to replicate fixed patterns, maintaining emotional distance by reminding himself that what he sees is a sophisticated machine, not his son. However, his initial reservations eventually fade with daily life together. The decisive factor is Otone’s transformation: seeing her regain her enthusiasm for her work as an architect, dedicate herself to caring for him, and rekindle a joy that seemed lost ultimately overcomes Kensuke’s resistance. Through various scenes in the film, the experience plunges the couple into a moral dilemma, leading them to question whether the android possesses a soul and is aware of the tragic circumstances of its death. This doubt stirs up self-reproach in the parents, long silenced by the accident, transforming the technological relief into a mirror reflecting their own unresolved guilt.

The Little Prince box

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, whose career is characterized by the precise dissection of human relationships, is less interested in the technical capabilities of Kakeru’s replacement than in the emotional resonance and internal dynamics it activates within the couple. The evolution of their cohabitation allows the director to X-ray the contemporary soul, explore our relationship with technology, and warn that the pursuit of limitless desire to avoid pain threatens to distort the human condition. Indeed, loving someone does not merely mean recognizing what is familiar, since resemblance never guarantees identity. Love completely transcends the reproduction of one’s own expectations, and technological progress does not eliminate emotional needs nor, in itself, resolve the grief of loss.

It is here that the film shifts toward the filmmaker’s true focus. By presenting the two most radical existential experiences of a person—love and the anguish of loss—Koreeda unfolds his narrative brilliance through the metaphor of the box in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince , which the mother recounts each night before bed, convinced she is speaking to her real son. The film’s international title, Sheep in the Box , confirms that the proposed relationship is not merely a rhetorical exercise.

Just as in the story, where the drawing on a box contains the image of the exact lamb the protagonist imagines, the humanoid functions as an empty container. Onto this technological medium, the parents project their own memories and frustrated expectations of what Kakeru should have been. The risk of technological control lies precisely in the fact that the machine doesn’t offer a real presence, but rather a programmed mirror that reflects back to the parents the exact image of their desires, shutting out all otherness. The couple believes they have regained control over their biography, over life and death. However, this is a fictional construct, tailored to their emotional needs to avoid, in this case, the abyss of loss and reduce it to an artificially manageable state. The moment a technological substitute fills the void, the original son ceases to see himself as a unique and irreplaceable being.

Anger as a release valve

Upon realizing that the machine will never be the loved one but merely a simulation, the obsession with immediate emotional gratification and total technological control collapses. Living with a replica imposes a state of self-deception that is unsustainable in the long run. The film reveals one of its most heartbreaking aspects through what could be described as the “broken toys”: a subplot where abandoned child androids display the consequences of their buyers’ frustration. Parents who adopt an automaton to replace a deceased child seek palliative relief from their grief. However, the dissonance between the expectations placed upon it and the inert nature of the artifact ultimately unleashes a form of substitute abuse. Upon realizing that the object is incapable of returning a filial gaze, impotence transforms into anger, and many of the parents hit and damage the replicas, venting their rage against their own inability to reclaim real life. From this perspective, the technological object transforms from a source of comfort into the scapegoat of a pathological grief. The shift from comforting fantasy to violence becomes visible when the robot child discovers a hidden community of abandoned and mutilated humanoid infants. This rupture forces Otone and Kensuke to confront the reality of their own home. When the couple understands that no automaton, however perfect, can replace a real child—for, as Saint-Exupéry aptly reminds us, what is essential remains invisible to the eyes—they make the liberating decision to let go of the humanoid and embrace the grieving process. Through this denouement, the director introduces his poetics on social marginalization and the bonds between the destitute.

Bioethical analysis

A bioethical analysis of the film from a personalist perspective highlights the profound challenges that emerge at the boundaries of our relationship with technology. In this sense, the philosopher Vicente Bellver argues that the denial of reality and the teleological condition of human existence proposes, instead, the hegemony of individual desire. Contemporary techno-capitalism has made this satisfaction its raison d’être, developing a technology that is based on the spirit of abstraction as a tendency to disconnect people from their material environment and even from their natural limits, such as the finitude of life, in order to reduce everything to data, algorithms, or mere individual desires. ^[1]

From a personalist anthropological perspective, this dynamic reveals a profound distortion of suffering as a path to existential maturation. Pain cannot be interpreted as a mere system failure that must be eradicated at any cost. This radical intolerance of the frustration inherent in the biological limit of death threatens to mold an immature humanity, incapable of developing compassion, resilience, and inner depth in the face of life’s mystery. Furthermore, the absolute primacy of desire creates a tailor-made affective environment in which we cease to relate to a real Other and instead interact with a programmed mirror of our own expectations. This constitutes the symbol of a fictitious self-sufficiency where death and pain cannot touch us, but at the price of dehumanizing our relationships.

The instrumental drift introduces a critical factor of commodification of pain, which manipulates human suffering and violates inalienable moral rights to one’s own identity. This corporate management of memory strips grief of its sacred and intimate character, transforming it into a consumer good subject to market forces.

The result of this dynamic is an ontological reductionism that degrades the personal condition. By attempting to replace absence with robotic engineering, the deceased child is treated as a replaceable object, ignoring that the person is, by definition, unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable. This produces a double alienation: on the one hand, the instrumentalization of the android, used as a mere emotional prosthesis to anesthetize a legitimate process; on the other, the alienation from grief itself. Technology constructs an illusion of artificial eternity that traps the parents in a false presence. This programmed fantasy not only prevents them from accepting finitude but also blocks the only authentic path to healing: experiencing the truth of real mourning.

Gabriel Marcel’s famous aphorism, “To love someone is to say to them: you will not die” ^[2] , is not about defying biology, but rather a metaphysical proclamation that appeals to a spiritual eternity founded on fidelity. True love does not clone the physical support of the loved one to avoid the pain; on the contrary, it manifests itself in a heart-wrenching but authentic mourning that, in honoring the memory of the lost person, recognizes the incalculable value of their uniqueness. ^[3]

Already in the “Song to Man,” a passage from Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone , a chorus—acting as the voice of conscience—praises human ingenuity in manufacturing and inventing, but also warns that technology cannot dictate its own laws nor be an end in itself, but rather requires higher criteria to guide it, situated in the realm of morality, respect for natural limits, and the preservation of the common good. ^[4] As Professor José Sanmartín rightly said, what is truly urgent is to become more humane and improve the lives of real people to make them more genuinely human. ^[5]

Amparo Aygües . Master’s Degree in Bioethics from the Catholic University of Valencia. Member of the Bioethics Observatory

Technical specifications

Original title: Hako no naka no hitsuji .

Year: 2026

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda

Country: Japan

Running time: 126 minutes

***

[1] Bellver, V. (2021). Transhumanism, transgender discourse and digitalism: demands of justice or effects of the spirit of abstraction? Persona y Derecho , (84), 17-53.

[2] Marcel, G. (1996). Being and having . Caparrós.

[3] Lewis, CS (1994). A Grief Observed . Anagrama.

[4] Sophocles. (2014). Antigone (Vol. Classical Library). Gredos.

[5] Sanmartín, J. (1990). Technology and the human future . Anthropos.