Science fiction in movies? You almost immediately think of sweeping epics set in distant eras or faraway galaxies or spectacular visual odysseys across outer space. There is, of course, another strain of science fiction rooted in the domestic and the familiar. Spielberg excels at this in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and, just a month ago, Disclosure Day. Yet even those films retain a sense of grandeur and spectacle that has become one of the genre’s defining virtues.

There is, however, another possibility for science fiction—more intimate (or perhaps “lo-fi” is the better label), built around a minimalist approach in which only a handful of details in narration and visual execution suggest the future and its consequences. (Godard’s Alphaville remains one of the most influential examples of this kind.) It is precisely this mode—where the world we know is altered only through subtle yet meaningful distortions—that Sheep in the Box embraces. As a result, director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest offering could hardly feel less Hollywood in either spirit or execution.

Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Monster) may well be one of the most unusual and unpredictable international auteurs working today. While the humanism and intimacy with which he stages deeply observed family portraits, or stories of misfits who improvise families of their own, remain recurring hallmarks of his filmography, it would be inaccurate to say that he keeps making the same film. The decision to set a story in a world where artificial intelligence has become commonplace and humanoid robots are gradually becoming normalized demonstrates the remarkable versatility of this filmmaker. At the same time, it reminds us that his ability to make an outlandish premise entirely his own is hardly new. He already accomplished this with After Life, imagining what happens after death, and Air Doll, about an inflatable sex doll discovering human emotions.

Living in the city of Kamakura, Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) remain together despite the death of their son, Kakeru. The seven-year-old died in a train-related accident during a moment of distraction while he was with his father, though the circumstances are never fully explained. The couple complement each other not only in their domestic lives but professionally as well: She is an architect, while he works as a master builder. Yet the burden of grief weighs far more heavily on Otone than on Kensuke, who eventually agrees—reluctantly—to try a product called REbirth, which allows parents who have lost a child to create a humanoid version of them.

This robotic Kakeru will possess the child’s memories—or as many as can be reconstructed from photographs and home videos—programmed according to whatever the parents deem appropriate. He will never grow up, nor can he eat or sleep, though he can convincingly pretend to do the latter while recharging his batteries.

And so Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) is reintroduced into the couple’s lives, complete with a built-in GPS that automatically deactivates him should he wander too far away. He also displays a remarkable ability to adapt, learn, and develop an intelligence that often feels more intuitive than merely programmed. As a child actor, Kuwaki is exceptional at conveying the ambiguity of a hyper-perceptive figure who is not entirely human yet has been designed to behave exactly like a little boy.

Although Kakeru embodies everything Otone imagines her son would have become—including his fascination with trains—her relatives are far less willing to participate in such a fragile simulation, even if everyone involved, including the boy himself, fully understands that he is not Kakeru but a robotic substitute. Otone’s mother rejects him almost immediately when she visits, while Kensuke insists that the boy not call him dad.

Though built with plenty of dramatic material, Sheep in the Box, whose title references the famous passage in The Little Prince where the child from another planet asks the aviator to draw him a sheep, gradually grows emotionally distant and ultimately unsatisfying as increasingly tangential storylines complicate its narrative. There are repeated mentions, for instance, of a child murderer at large—a thread with virtually no relevance—as well as the introduction of a tribe of discarded humanoid children who have either escaped or been abandoned. Kakeru’s story does eventually intersect with the latter, but the film often feels as though it were assembled from a screenplay unable to decide what it truly wanted to explore. Still, individual moments—such as Kensuke speaking to Kakeru as though he were his real son—carry genuine emotional weight and leave you wishing the film had remained more firmly anchored in its family drama.

At the same time, Kore-eda’s film inevitably invites comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which reimagined Pinocchio as a futuristic story about a robot boy yearning to become human. Unfortunately, that comparison is not entirely favorable. The newer movie falls short because its ambitions become increasingly unfocused. Even so, as an unusual fairy tale about a future closer than we might like to imagine, Sheep in the Box possesses a haunting beauty in its suggestion that to be human is to become human, a mystery the film wisely preserves without burdening it with obvious and excessive explanations.