MIFF 2026: Sheep in the Box

Melbourne International Film Festival 2026 is ongoing and I went to watch my first session (of 14!)

This post my short review of ‘Sheep in the Box’. The first sections are spoiler free, then it'll be spoiler heavy as I discuss detailed points in the movie. Marked below.

For context: I am a photographer that wants to up my cinematography and storytelling, that’s why I’m watching 14 sessions at the film festival PLUS reviewing them here on my blog!

I started going to MIFF last year, watching movies and reviewing them here in my blog. This is my first session for 2026! Well, it’s supposed to be my second. But the first viewing had an issue with the subtitle so they cancelled that… thankfully the subtitle worked for this one!

I chose to watch ‘Sheep in a Box’ because of the intriguing synopsis in the age of AI. A humanoid robot ran by gen AI that supposed to replace your loved ones. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode 'Be Right Back', in fact the premise is almost exactly the same. However, the overarching story and the storytelling itself is quite different. Another similar fiction work is 'Klara and the Sun', novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The theme is also around artificial life. The difference for this one is that it's written from the perspective of the humanoid. Whereas 'Sheep in the Box' is leaning towards telling the story of the family.

Alright, let’s talk about it!

All screen caps courtesy of the movie. All drawings are by me

Who would I recommend this to?

A fan of the lighter hearted episodes of Black Mirror. Sci-fi movie lovers where the sci-fi elements are not overtly obvious. In another way, the sci-fi element is not the main point of the story. Fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's work, I think it has similar ideas on the human soul.

Structure

The structure of the story is clean cut. It's not explicitly separated as chapters, but it's pretty telling that there is a delineation of emotion. Since the story revolves around grief, I think it's portraying the different stages of grief. It's even explicitly mentioned as such. In a way, it makes the movie easy to follow and enjoyable. That said, there are still hidden twists and turns woven into the main storyline. Though the twists are not huge and mind bending, they provide a sense of mystery.

All in all, the structure is quite opaque. And the opaqueness also extends to the narrative.

Narrative

The main story is linear, with branches in the middle that feel unresolved. Or at the very least, they need more thinking and imagination of what happens off-screen. The on-screen story is straightforward and easy to follow – which matches the structure of the movie. I enjoyed the narrative. It leans towards the simpler side, perhaps a nice movie to watch with a younger audience.

The jokes in it are so funny. I audibly laughed in many bits, along with the whole cinema. The dialogue does a good job on balancing serious and humorous, and the actors delivered. At first the dad seemed like a nonchalant person, then seemed like the comic-relief, then went into a serious-drama person. I guess what I'm saying is that the characters are written in a multi-dimensional way. They are not put into a box (ha!) of a character trope.

The soundtrack was lovely too. There are some parts that I thought would have a totally different feeling if the soundtrack was scarier. They kept it light hearted throughout the movie, which made the mysteries felt whimsical rather than horrifying. Closer to 'Klara and the Sun' rather than 'Black Mirror.'

Lastly, the colour grading packages the movie in a consistent manner too. The colours are soft or even muted. It lends well to the narrative, it complements it and doesn't fight it. I guess that's to be expected or even the bare minimum, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!

Past this point, the review contains heavy spoilers.

Cinematography

This is the strongest point of the movie, in my opinion. There's a lot of conveying meaning via the cinematography. The 'box' in the title is heavily used throughout the movie. I sketched some of my favourites:

I hope my drawings can give some idea. But the movie itself is very nicely shot. I think the stills from some scenes would be great photos, I guess that's what makes great cinematography work? Overall, I really enjoyed the video work in the movie, really beautiful!

'Aha!' moments

Bits of the movies that was like, "ah, that was clever". Full of spoilers, read this after you watch it!

• The cat Othello missing at the beginning of the movie analogs with Kakeru breaking out of the confinement.
• The aquarium scene was full of jokes from dad wanting to eat the sea creatures. He wants to take them out, but to eat them and not to free them. It’s a theme with the cat, Othello, too. Humans look at the other living beings as things to use. This is exacerbated by the carpenter that talked about being connected to the wood as living beings, even with that noble mindset, humans still use up things around them. Maybe it's okay with plants, and somewhat okay with animals (activists groups might disagree), but how about artificially intelligent humanoids?
• The mom's mom mentioning stages of grief - linking the movies directly to it.
• At the end, the mom explicitly said "ah, turns out I was the one in the box after all". I think it can be argued that she didn't need to say this out loud and let the audience connect the dots to figure it out ourselves.
• Although I called the story being opaque and linear, there's a background off-screen story on the kidnapping. Plus the company's technician not alerting the family that the GPS was removed. So there are still story points for the audience to imagine or infer themselves. They are just not story points that are particularly important to the overall story, in my opinion.