Taika Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' Called Lifeless in First Reviews

By Tom Whitfield

Taika Waititi's film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel "Klara and the Sun" premieres with some of the harshest notices of the director's career, with one leading review calling the project "a hopeless mismatch of filmmaker and source material."

The film, which screened at the London Film Festival after skipping September's season-launching festivals, opens in theaters on October 23.

The review, published by Variety, delivers a withering verdict: the film has "all the cultural staying power of a standard ChatGPT conversation" and is "pitched too juvenile for adults, and way too dull for children."

Who made the film, and who stars?

Waititi directs from a script he co-wrote with Dahvi Waller, a television veteran of "Mrs. America" making her first big-screen credit. Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel laureate in literature, takes an executive producer credit — a detail the review notes with visible skepticism about the author's view of the result.

The cast:

• Jenna Ortega as Klara, the solar-powered android at the story's center
• Amy Adams as Chrissy, the guarded mother
• Mia Tharia, recently seen in "The Education of Jane Cumming," as the ailing teen Josie
• Natasha Lyonne as the manager of the midcentury-styled Friend Store
• Rachel House as housekeeper Melania

Michael Giacchino composed the score, described in the review as "overbearingly precious."

What is the story about?

The novel, published in 2021, is a companion piece of sorts to Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" — swap in AI robots for clones, as the review puts it, and "Klara" plows much the same field. That earlier novel received what the review calls a fitting adaptation in Mark Romanek's chilly 2010 film.

Waititi's version transposes the material into a twee, child's-eye register. The setting is a post-Third World War future in which the internet has collapsed and wealthy parents buy "artificial friends" — humanoid AFs — as companions for their isolated children. Klara is purchased for Josie, who lives in what the review calls "an isolated and wholly unbelievable Midwest-ish farmhouse" and who, it emerges, has a life-threatening illness.

The comparison is hard to avoid: "Jojo Rabbit," Waititi's earlier adaptation of solemn material as cockeyed comedy, won him an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million. The review argues that even that film's defenders are unlikely to follow him here.

Where does the film go wrong?

The review's core charge is tonal. Waititi's cutesy affectations "fight the stoic sadness of Ishiguro's storytelling at every turn," while the comedy lands as "strikingly unfunny" — the opening section is compared to "a ghastly dystopian update of 'Annie.'"

The performances draw split verdicts. Ortega is praised as "innately charismatic" but said to be defeated by one-note writing that reduces Klara to "a relentlessly hopeful, Pollyanna-esque naif." Adams is described as "script-trapped," shouldering grief comparable to her "Arrival" role without being allowed to express it.

The review also notes what the film fails to show: although the story's later stages hinge on Klara's failing digital memory, "we never get a vivid sense of how she actually sees the world" beyond some pixelated glitch effects.

The script's existential questions about artificial life, the review adds, have been probed "with more nuance and wit" by films including "Ex Machina," "Her," "Marjorie Prime" and "Robot Dreams."

The final image is blunt: the film is "a warmly worded Hallmark card from an artificial friend."

What does this change for Waititi?

Probably little immediately — "Jojo Rabbit" proved that critical controversy does not necessarily limit box office. But the review positions this as the clearest evidence yet that Waititi's ironic-farce method cannot absorb Ishiguro's plainspoken pathos, and with the film arriving absent from the fall festival season's top premieres, its commercial and awards prospects now rest on whether general audiences disagree with the critics. Opening weekend, October 23, will supply the first answer.