‘Klara and the Sun’ Review: What Happens When a Robot Who Prays to the Sky Meets a Director Who Can’t Resist a Punchline
‘Klara and the Sun’ reaches cinemas on October 23 following its premiere at the London Film Festival, and it is one of the stranger matches of filmmaker and material this year. Taika Waititi, the Academy Award winner behind ‘Jojo Rabbit’, directs and shares the screenplay credit with Dahvi Waller, adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about an artificial companion who watches humans more closely than they watch each other.
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, a discontinued B1 model sold from a city discount store until a girl named Josie, played by Mia Tharia, talks her mother Chrissie, played by Amy Adams, into bringing her home. In the countryside Klara can finally soak up the sunlight that powers her, and she treats the sun as something very close to a god. She also has to learn that this household carries grief of its own, along with a health secret Josie keeps from her.
That premise should produce something hushed and unsettling, and here is where my trouble starts. Waititi has described this as his most dramatic film, yet the first hour chases laughs that almost never arrive, and whenever a scene edges toward real feeling he reaches for a gag to let the air out. It plays like a nature documentary narrated by someone who cannot stop cracking jokes during the sad parts.
Ortega deserves better than the film gives her. Her wide eyed, energetic Klara is the warmest thing on screen, and she shares an easy chemistry with Tharia that makes the friendship feel lived in. Aran Murphy’s Rick adds some sweetness as Josie’s boyfriend, though an android scarecrow wanders in looking like a visitor from an entirely different movie.
The deeper problem is perspective. Klara’s oddness works best when we are locked inside her literal, trusting gaze, and a film that keeps stepping outside that gaze loses the intimacy that made her interesting. Her faith in the sun, which should be the emotional engine, gets thinned out as the plot hurries along its final stretch.
By the time Steve Buscemi turns up as a creepy presence in the last act, the movie has so much to resolve that it can only gesture at the unease it should have been building all along. Pollution, inequality and the fragile place of machines in family life sit politely in the background like set dressing. At 116 minutes it never drags, but it also never digs, and Michael Giacchino’s score can only do so much to supply the weight the script avoids.
I left the cinema charmed by Ortega and frustrated by almost everything orbiting her. There are moments of tenderness and a few striking images of Klara turning her face toward the light, and they hint at the quiet, eerie film this could have been. As it stands, the jokes and the tonal whiplash keep winning, and I land on 4 out of 10.
Did Waititi’s comic touch sink ‘Klara and the Sun’ for you, or did Ortega’s performance win you over, so tell me in the comments whether you agree with my verdict.
