A robot girl designed to prevent loneliness tries to save a heartbroken human family.
“Klara and the Sun” brings Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling 2021 novel to the big screen, with Taika Waititi directing and co-writing the adaptation alongside Dahvi Waller. Jenna Ortega stars as Klara, an Artificial Friend who is brought into the life of Josie, played by Mia Tharia, and gradually tries to understand the complicated human relationships, love, and loss surrounding her new family.
On paper, a lot of this should work for me. Unfortunately, “Klara and the Sun” is really messy.
The movie clearly wants to say something meaningful about friendship, relationships, loss, accepting that loss, and appreciating what you have while it is still here with you. The problem is that the messaging feels all over the place, without a consistent enough theme or tone to hold everything together. There is also so much exposition delivered through dialogue rather than character actions that I constantly felt like the movie was telling me what its characters were thinking or feeling instead of letting me experience it alongside them.
Taika Waititi’s signature weirdness is also present as always, but this might be one of the biggest things that didn’t work for me. There were so many moments when I genuinely couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to laugh or cringe at the jokes and random things happening on screen. A lot of it feels like it’s there to fill empty moments of silence or break up the serious conversations the movie is trying to have, and it regularly took me out of scenes that were supposed to carry some emotional weight.
Jenna Ortega is good at this, and I still think she’s incredibly talented. The problem is that I don’t think there is enough meat on the bone for Klara to become as meaningful or impactful as she needs to be. Ortega does what she can with the material, but I never connected with Klara emotionally in the way I think the movie intended.
I also felt like the cast was somewhat misaligned with their roles. I never really felt like everyone around Jenna Ortega was operating at her level, and some performances made scenes that were supposed to carry a lot of emotional impact feel surprisingly flat. At times, it honestly felt like Ortega was placed in a room with people just starting, and unfortunately, that’s how some of those performances came across.
The bigger issue is that the fish-out-of-water element of a robot learning about human nature, life, death, love, and relationships feels all too familiar. We’ve seen countless variations of artificial beings trying to understand what makes someone human, and Klara and the Sun never gave me enough of a different perspective to make its take on those ideas feel particularly new.
Some plot developments also feel confusing and almost like the result of rewrites. Certain ideas suddenly become important without feeling properly teased or connected to what the movie seemed to be setting up in the beginning. Instead of adding another layer to the story, they stood out to me because they didn’t feel like a natural extension of what the movie was originally trying to say.
Visually, the film has solid production design for a sci-fi robot story. One specific positive for me was actually the cars. I really liked the retro yet realistically futuristic designs, especially the huge headlight and taillight bars and the way the driverless technology was incorporated without making everything feel ridiculously futuristic. I genuinely had the thought, “Yeah, this could be pretty spot-on in less than 10 years.” It’s a small detail, but I thought it was one of the more believable interpretations of what our near future could actually look like.
What disappoints me most is that I can see the good story somewhere within Klara and the Sun. It has genuinely compelling ideas about friendship, relationships, loss, finding a way to move forward from that loss, and appreciating the people you have while they are still here. Those are themes that should have worked incredibly well for this kind of story. Instead, they get bogged down by inconsistent storytelling and a lot of questionable Taika-ness that was too wacky for my personal taste.
For me, Taika Waititi has lost some of the touch that made his earlier work connect. His style works best for me when all of that weirdness and humor is honed in around a really clear core message about love, relationships, and the people we surround ourselves with. Here, the humor and emotional storytelling rarely feel like they’re complementing each other. More often, they feel like they’re fighting each other.
Ultimately, I think Klara and the Sun is a decent watch at home on streaming if you’re a Jenna Ortega fan or really enjoy this particular corner of sci-fi. It has a good story, interesting production design, and a movie that clearly wants to say something meaningful about being human. Unfortunately, I don’t think it gives enough weight to the increasingly crowded sci-fi genre of robots and AI learning what it means to be human.
In Theaters Friday, October 23rd
