Legendary Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has become a mainstay of the Cannes Film Festival. His newest film, Sheep in the Box, a sci-fi tale about a couple who adopt a humanoid robot after the death of their son, will be his eighth film to play in competition. The Toyko-born Kore-eda served on the jury, headed by Greta Gerwig, two years ago, and before that, his film Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or in 2018 and went on to earn an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film.

But while a lot of promise surrounded Kore-eda when he was first called to Cannes in 2001 with his film Distance, that invitation might have been premature, and his later success could not have been predicted. In Filmmaker Magazine, Noah Cowan wrote, “I am a big fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Distance. But following his pitch-perfect global hit After Life, which seemed to single-handedly resurrect the metaphysical art film, expectations were running way too high to put this very small, fragile film under the heat of competition.”

The film takes place three years after a cult poisoned Tokyo’s drinking water then committed mass suicide; five survivors revisit the site of the suicide and reminisce about those they lost. Cowan called the story “so ambiguous and unresolved that it allows small yields only after much work. But I can think of no filmmaker with the courage to try such an austere approach with such an open wound of a subject, especially in Japan. Rumor has it that it was elevated to compete at the last minute — how foolish.”

THR critic Michael Rechtshaffen was less forgiving, saying, “With its reliance on shaky handheld camera work, unscripted dialog and a heavily wooded backdrop, Distance feels like The Blair Witch Project minus the creepy bits.”

But Cannes stuck with Kore-eda, who later told interviewer Kuriko Sato that “the experience of making Distance gave me a wider perspective on how a film can be made.”

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