Review of “Klara and the Sun”: Taika Waititi’s hollow adaptation

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction is characterized by its focus on interiority, its perspective on the world typically that of an unpretentious outsider with restricted knowledge or selective memory. Such limitations prove essential to the slow emotional devastation of its deceptively simple stories. So it’s hard to imagine many filmmakers less adept at conveying his sensibility to the big screen than Taika Waititi, a wry extrovert whose most recent literary adaptation, Jojo Rabbitsaw him brighten up Christine Leunens’ dark Second World War novel Caged Skies with an imaginary and clumsy Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi himself. And yet, here he is at the helm of Klara and the suna faithful adaptation that nonetheless strips away everything insightful and touching about Ishiguro’s novel.

The film’s main character (Jenna Ortega) is an AF (“artificial friend”), a robot companion for teenagers who has spent her entire existence with other AFs in a struggling store run by a worn-out, world-weary android they call Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne). Klara spends her time standing virtually motionless in front of a window, eagerly trying to analyze the subtleties of human emotions in the encounters she witnesses on the street and envying the more chic and technologically advanced AFs in the store across the street.

That is, until Josie (Mia Tharia) walks past the store one day, immediately recognizing a kindred spirit in this uncoordinated, wide-eyed misfit with a peculiar habit of standing on one leg. Despite the protests of Josie’s mother, Chrissy (Amy Adams), Klara is taken to their isolated rural mansion and develops a close bond with Josie, as she learns more about the young girl’s strained relationship with her mother and the mysterious death of her older sister.

Although Klara has little of the depth she possesses in Ishiguro’s novel, there is a charm here in Ortega’s untouched seriousness, as she somehow remains just on the right side of schmaltz. But contrasts are rarely drawn between Klara’s personality and the darkness of the dystopian society that gave birth to her, and there are few hints of the uncomfortable human truths to which she has no access. In fact, Waititi’s film seems to be primarily inspired by her. While Ishiguro dramatizes the struggles of a machine consciousness learning to be authentic and to love, Waititi goes in the opposite direction, suggesting that we might have something to learn from the perspective of an adorable, people-pleasing robot.

Among Waititi and co-writer Davhi Waller’s many failures to develop, or even commit to, the futuristic premise, perhaps the most egregious is their meager explanation of the “facelift,” a genetic engineering procedure that Chrissy chose to perform on her daughters. Being raised gave Josie genius mental abilities, but at the cost of serious and permanent damage to her physical health. There are a few scenes in which Adams effectively displays Chrissy’s feelings on the matter, a convincing mix of guilt, stubbornness, and grief, but his performance is ultimately compromised by the absence of any clear information about the social or psychological pressures that might have influenced Chrissy one way or another. Like so many other ideas here, it seems incidental, without any deeper philosophical or emotional significance.

Lacking any real narrative or thematic connective tissue, Klara and the sun starts to feel almost episodic, as it randomly jumps around potentially interesting storylines. And the film’s weak understanding of the significance of its own story means that when Klara and Chrissy visit a pioneering scientist, Capaldi (Steve Buscemi), who reveals the truth about Klara’s role in the family unit, what should be a revolutionary existential twist falls completely flat.

With AI advancing exponentially even since the 2021 release of Ishiguro’s novel, Klara and the sunThe simplistic YA-style presentation can’t help but feel like a major missed opportunity to say something important about what truly makes us human. Indeed, the degree to which the film wants to contribute to the cultural conversation could be inferred from the fact that Klara is told early on “you’re not the droid we’re looking for”, a wink from the self-aware Waititian audience that is surely, at this point, just as outdated as the original. Star Wars the films themselves. It’s also a phrase that suggests his mind is elsewhere, obsessed with more lucrative intellectual property, perhaps explaining why he displays such a profound lack of interest in his sources here.