Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film is a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods; it is a futurist fable of AI-humanoid robot children, unpersuasively performed in a returning keynote of bland serenity. It is perhaps comparable to Kore-eda’s 2009 film Air Doll, a more adult story of man whose sex doll secretly comes to life.
Otone (Haruka Ayasi) – an architect who appears to work from home, with no office scenes or colleagues visible – is an educated woman married to down-to-earth Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter who likes beer and playing baseball. Two years previously, their seven-year-old son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), was killed by a hit-and-run driver who has never been caught. They are approached by a company called REbirth, whose offices are huge and white with creepy logos and designs, like all sinister corporations in the movies, although the question of whether REbirth is supposed to be sinister is one of the film’s many unanswered questions.
