Contemporary sci-fi tends toward the dystopian, so there’s something almost refreshing about the vision of the future offered by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film. “Sheep in the Box” poses a question few of us have thought to ask: What if the world of tomorrow wasn’t bleak, just kind of boring?

This soft-focus android drama, which screened in the main competition section at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month, is a rare misfire from the director, who won a Palme d’Or for his 2018 film “Shoplifters.” AI was one of the dominant topics at this year’s Cannes (which now counts Meta as a sponsor), but Kore-eda’s contribution to the discourse is strangely inconsequential. It’s as if this veteran observer of the human condition has gazed into the heart of the machine and found himself with nothing to say.

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