Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, opened to $701,059 in North America over the weekend of October 23 to 25. Sony Pictures released it on a reported budget of $20 million. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and wrote The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. This book is about a robot companion who comes to believe the Sun can heal a sick girl. Jenna Ortega stars as the robot, and Amy Adams plays the girl’s mother. I went because the trailers and the book’s reputation caught my interest, and I came out thinking it is an excellent film that was handed a short runway.
What It’s About
The story is set in a near future where families can buy an “Artificial Friend,” a humanoid robot built as a companion for a child. Klara is one of them. She is solar-powered, so sunlight is literally what keeps her alive, and she waits in a store window hoping a child will choose her. Chrissie (Adams) buys her for her sick teenage daughter Josie (Mia Tharia).
Klara goes home to a household that does not explain itself to her. She studies Josie, Chrissie, and Josie’s neighbor and closest friend Rick (Aran Murphy), and works out what is wrong from what she can see. Because the Sun feeds her, she treats it as the source of all life. She walks out to a barn at the edge of a wheat field where she believes it rests each night. When Josie’s health worsens, Klara bargains with the Sun. She offers to give up something she values in exchange for Josie’s recovery.
Meanwhile, Chrissie has a plan for Klara that is far darker than any prayer, and it drives the most unsettling stretch of the story. The world around them adds to the unease. In this future, some parents genetically enhance their children to give them an edge in life, a procedure with serious risks. Natasha Lyonne plays the Store Manager who sells Klara, and Steve Buscemi appears as Capaldi, a mysterious figure in the story.
The Director and the Screenplay
Waititi directed the film and co-wrote the script with Dahvi Waller, who wrote for Mad Men. He won an Oscar for the screenplay of Jojo Rabbit, a satire about a boy in Nazi Germany with an imaginary Hitler for a friend. He also made Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a New Zealand comedy about a foster kid and a gruff man on the run in the bush, and Thor: Ragnarok for Marvel. His work tends to bury sincerity inside a joke, and Klara and the Sun is his heaviest material.
He dresses it in bright, storybook color and deadpan comedy. The look is close to Wes Anderson, the director of The Grand Budapest Hotel, known for symmetrical framing, pastel palettes, and dry humor. I think Waititi pushes it too far. A story about a dying child and a mother making a terrible decision does not need that many jokes, and the scenes of people playing with the robot as if she were a toy grate.
The style does serve Klara, though. She sees the world as bright, orderly, and worth trusting, and the film shows it to us that way. Her innocence reads as innocence because the screen has that sheen.
The novel is told entirely through Klara’s eyes. Waititi and Waller widen the story past her point of view, and critics have faulted that choice. The bigger problem for me is the ending, covered below.
The Performances
Ortega holds the film together. This is the best role of her career and some of the hardest acting she has done. Klara has to be childlike without being simple, and Ortega carries long stretches of the film with her face alone. The supporting cast, including Adams, Lyonne, Buscemi, and Tharia, does a lot with smaller parts.
What the Film Gets Right
The central theme is childlike faith. Klara cannot see how the Sun might help Josie, but she trusts that it can, reasons from what she observes, and offers a sacrifice in hope. That is a Christian shape for a story, and the film plays it straight. The faith is what she needs, and it shapes how she sees everyone around her. It makes her an innocent worth rooting for.
Family is the second theme, and the film takes a traditional view of it. The parents who enhance their children are trying to engineer a better life, and the story shows the cost of playing God with the people you are supposed to love. Klara is the counterweight, because she gives her full attention to the person in front of her. That is harder to do in modern life than it sounds, and the film makes the case for it. It also makes the case for staying in the moment with the people you love while you still have them.
Where It Falls Short
A few CGI shots look rough, which matters little in a film built on character moments. The pace is slow and there is no action at all. The movie is introspective from start to finish, and the humor sometimes works against that mood.
Spoiler warning for the next paragraph.
The ending is the real flaw. Josie recovers and goes off to college, but she is absent from the final stretch and Klara is damaged, so a viewer cannot tell whether Klara is seeing what happened or imagining it. The film needed to show that Josie was saved. The theme of faith answered depends on it, and the novel leaves less doubt about Josie’s recovery.
Why It Is Failing
Anyone who felt this film arrived with little noise is not imagining it. Filming wrapped in April 2024, and Sony then held the movie for more than a year while it decided how to release it. The first public trailer did not appear until late June 2026, about four months before opening day.
Six weeks before release, tracking put the film in the low single digits. Tracking is the studio’s polling of how many people say they want to see a film, and low single digits means almost no one. Marketing sources saw little audience in a novel that is acclaimed but not widely read, so the film had no built-in fanbase to lean on.
Then the film premiered at the London Film Festival on October 15, and several major British papers, including The Guardian and The Times, gave it one star. Its Rotten Tomatoes critic score landed between 20 and 25 percent, the lowest of Waititi’s career. Sony responded by cutting the release from roughly 1,900 screens to 880 and trimming its marketing spend, which sources put below $30 million worldwide. A film that already had thin promotion ended up with less. On the same weekend, A24’s You Can See Everything, co-directed by comedian Nathan Fielder, opened to $15 million. Sony has since pulled the film’s planned release in Spain.
The audience has been kinder than the critics. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score sits at 78 percent, against 25 percent from critics.
The Verdict
Klara and the Sun is slow and quiet, with a faithful heart and a lead performance worth seeing. Viewers who want action will not find it. Viewers who want a story about faith, family, and attention to the people in front of them will.
Sony held a film about faith and sacrifice for more than a year, then cut its release after one round of London reviews. Would the audience that scored it 78 percent have found it if the studio had given it a full run?
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Whatever about other thoughts, all were squeezed out for this one;
"Isn't this the completely wrong season for a film like that?"