A near-future Tokyo household forms the setting for Sheep In The Box, a 2026 Japanese drama from director Hirokazu Koreeda that turns an ordinary domestic routine into something quietly unsettling. Architect Otone Komoto and her husband Kensuke, who runs a construction company, decide their home needs one more member -- a humanoid robot they choose to raise as their son.
What is Sheep In The Box about?
The film follows the couple's decision from the inside, watching how a machine built to resemble a child reshapes the rhythm of their marriage and the assumptions each partner brought into it. Otone's professional eye for structure and space collides with a much less measurable question: what it actually means to parent. Kensuke's construction background gives him a practical, hands-on relationship with the robot that differs sharply from his wife's. Rather than treating the premise as science-fiction spectacle, the story stays close to the couple's everyday choices -- who feeds the robot, who corrects its behavior, who talks about it to visitors -- and lets the strangeness of the situation surface through those small domestic details instead of through plot twists.
About the cast
Haruka Ayase and Kotaro Daigo lead the film as Otone and Kensuke, playing out a marriage under a pressure that has no precedent to draw on. Both actors work largely in restrained, internal registers here, letting silences and small gestures carry scenes that could easily have tipped into melodrama.
Context & significance
Sheep In The Box arrives from Japan as a 2026 drama and sits inside a small but persistent tradition of Japanese cinema that uses domestic, near-future technology to ask old questions about family rather than to imagine a changed world. The construction and architecture professions given to the two leads are not incidental -- they frame the household itself as something built, maintained, and occasionally reinforced, which mirrors the robot's own presence in the home.
Watching Sheep In The Box on Ktime
Sheep In The Box streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow every domestic exchange in their own language rather than relying on the original Japanese. Reading this page requires nothing; watching the film itself needs only a free K-Time account, after which the movie sits alongside the rest of K-Time's Farsi-friendly catalogue built for the Iranian diaspora.