The fantasy drama Barashek v yashchike (The Lamb in the Box) by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has opened in Russian cinemas. The story is set in the near future, where the corporation Vozrozhdeniye offers a service that creates androids indistinguishable from deceased relatives. Artificial intelligence reconstructs the personality of the deceased based on photographs and video recordings provided by the clients.
The main characters are architect Otone (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo), whose seven-year-old son died two years earlier. The woman decides to take up the corporation's offer and receives a free trial copy of the child. Her husband is skeptical of the idea, considers the corporation a pack of hyenas profiting from other people's misfortune, and compares the android to a robot vacuum cleaner. Later, however, it becomes clear that Kensuke has a plan of his own: with the help of artificial intelligence, he hopes to find out the circumstances of his son's death, the perpetrator of which was never found.
The film's title refers to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's tale The Little Prince, in which the pilot draws a box for the prince and suggests he imagine an ideal lamb inside it. According to the director's concept, the android is such a box, which parents fill with their own memories of the child.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or, the top prize of the Cannes Film Festival, in 2018. The Lamb in the Box was also presented in the festival's main competition, but it did not manage to repeat that success.
Letters