KLARA AND THE SUN in theatres this weekend

Jenna Ortega plays Klara  TRAILER

 

The Beautiful Strangeness of Klara and the Sun

Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is an imperfect, occasionally bewildering fable about artificial intelligence, human vulnerability, and the curious persistence of hope. Its very oddness is part of its appeal.

There is something endearingly peculiar about Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, a film that seems to have wandered into the wrong future and decided to make itself comfortable. Its world is too picturesque for its tragedies, its artificial intelligence too guileless for its philosophical ambitions, and its emotions too conspicuously arranged to pass for the difficult, private business of being human. Yet I found myself enjoying it, sometimes in spite of its shortcomings and sometimes because of them. With its pastel melancholy, retrofuturist furnishings, eccentric rhythms, and almost anime-like understanding of emotional expression, the film possesses an unusual visual personality that is difficult to dismiss. It may not penetrate the mysteries of consciousness with the precision its source material invites, but it approaches those mysteries with an openhearted strangeness of its own. I left less persuaded by its philosophy than charmed by its peculiar little universe.

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to accompany children, whose attentive, slightly disconcerting gaze becomes our principal means of encountering this altered society. When Josie, a seriously ill teenager played by Mia Tharia, selects Klara as her companion, the android enters a household where affection is inseparable from apprehension. Josie's mother, Chrissy, portrayed by Amy Adams, is struggling with the possibility of losing her daughter, while the family inhabits a future in which technological advancement has become both a promise of salvation and a mechanism of social exclusion. Klara observes everything with the solemn concentration of someone who has arrived on Earth without receiving the explanatory literature. Human gestures, passing expressions, and the mysterious behavior of sunlight acquire enormous significance in her developing understanding of existence. Ortega gives this peculiar consciousness a winning physical vocabulary: a held posture, an uncertain movement, a face whose openness seems almost to expose the machinery beneath it. There is a sweetness here, although the film occasionally mistakes sweetness for depth.

The distinction matters because Ishiguro's novel, published in 2021, is a considerably more restrained and unsettling proposition. Like Never Let Me Go, it allows its speculative premise to unfold through a consciousness that cannot entirely comprehend the world it inhabits. Klara's limitations are essential to the novel's achievement. She observes human beings with extraordinary attentiveness, yet her interpretations remain partial, leaving readers to recognize the emotional realities she cannot fully articulate. Her faith in the sun as a benevolent, sustaining presence gives the narrative a delicate spiritual dimension without resolving its uncertainties. What does it mean to possess consciousness? Does love depend upon the nature of the person who gives it, or upon the needs of the person who receives it? And if a machine can become indispensable to someone who suffers, does its artificial origin ultimately matter? Waititi's film raises these questions, but it is less interested in allowing them to linger. It prefers to make them visible, colorful, and occasionally funny. The difference is not insignificant. Still, a film need not reproduce the intellectual temperature of a novel to justify its existence.

Waititi's particular sensibility is immediately recognizable. The director of Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople has often found comedy in the awkward behavior of people who have no adequate language for their pain. His humor can make vulnerability bearable, exposing the absurdity that coexists with sorrow. In Klara and the Sun, however, the balance is less assured. The opening scenes, featuring android companions displayed for prospective buyers, flirt with retail satire and the peculiar comedy of manufactured innocence. Natasha Lyonne, presiding over the proceedings with her characteristically tart eccentricity, seems to have arrived from a more mischievous movie. Klara's unusual movements and literal-minded observations likewise invite amusement. But as Josie's illness assumes greater importance, the film shifts toward domestic melodrama, and the tonal transition can feel abrupt, as though somebody had changed the channel without changing the scenery. The comedy does not always deepen the sorrow that follows it. Sometimes it merely sits beside it, waiting for its turn to speak.

Visually, though, the film has an undeniable appeal. Its future looks strangely nostalgic, as if technological progress had taken place inside a memory of the mid-twentieth century. Warm golds, carefully composed interiors, and objects that seem to belong to several different historical periods give the setting the quality of an illustrated fable. The cinematography favors a softened, luminous atmosphere, while the production design imagines a civilization that has advanced technologically without relinquishing its affection for the tangible and familiar. This is not the cold, metallic dystopia that speculative cinema so often supplies. It is a future with the slightly artificial charm of a dollhouse, beautiful enough to inhabit and strange enough to distrust. At times, I was reminded more of anime than of conventional live-action science fiction: not necessarily in any literal stylistic correspondence, but in the willingness to let a heightened visual world carry emotions that ordinary realism might leave unexpressed. The result can be twee, even absurd. It can also be lovely. The film's artificiality becomes part of its imaginative signature.

Beneath these attractive surfaces lies a darker social arrangement that the screenplay never quite develops. Genetic enhancement appears to offer privileged children a competitive advantage, while those excluded from such interventions risk becoming increasingly irrelevant. Artificial companions occupy an equally ambiguous position, serving as commercial products while assuming roles that families once expected human relationships to fulfill. Josie's illness brings these larger anxieties into intimate focus. Her mother's desperation is understandable precisely because it is so difficult to separate from love: how far might a parent go to preserve a child, and at what point does the desire to defeat mortality become a refusal to recognize another person's vulnerability? Adams conveys flashes of this terrible emotional arithmetic, suggesting a woman whose composure is an increasingly fragile defense against catastrophe. Yet the screenplay gives her too little psychological space. The social consequences of enhancement remain sketchy, and the ethical questions surrounding Josie's future are introduced more clearly than they are examined. The film gestures toward a world transformed by technological inequality without making that transformation sufficiently tangible.

Adams nevertheless lends the domestic drama a seriousness that the surrounding material sometimes struggles to sustain. Her restrained expressions suggest fears that the dialogue cannot adequately contain, and her performance gives Chrissy an emotional weight beyond the character's occasionally schematic construction. Tharia, meanwhile, brings Josie a believable mixture of reserve and vulnerability, although the film too often positions her as the embodiment of an ethical dilemma rather than as a teenager with a fully independent inner life. Ortega remains the film's most intriguing presence. Her Klara is earnest without being entirely innocent, observant without being conventionally perceptive. The difficulty is that the screenplay repeatedly converts her unfamiliarity with human behavior into a source of charm, leaving insufficient room for the strangeness to become genuinely unsettling. Klara is supposed to illuminate the people around her, but she is also an intelligence whose consciousness should resist our complete understanding. The film makes her likable before it makes her mysterious.

This limitation becomes especially apparent when Klara's memory begins to deteriorate. Here, the story approaches one of its most affecting possibilities: the idea that a being assembled from observation might lose the very experiences through which it has constructed an identity. For a human being, memory is already an unreliable architecture, subject to revision, omission, and the consolations of self-invention. For an artificial consciousness, its failure raises an additional question: if the accumulated record of experience disappears, what remains of the person who experienced it? The film's visual glitches communicate malfunction, but not always the intimate terror of an existence coming apart from within. Nevertheless, the premise has a quiet emotional force. Klara's vulnerability invites us to contemplate our own dependence on the fragile continuity of memory, and the possibility that personhood may be less a stable possession than something continually reconstructed. The film comes closest to philosophical seriousness when it stops trying to explain its android and allows her fragility to speak for itself.

There is, finally, something touching about the film's insistence that hope need not be intellectually sophisticated to be emotionally consequential. Klara believes in the sun. She believes that careful observation and purposeful action might make a difference to someone she loves. Her understanding of the universe is incomplete, perhaps even naïve, but then so is much of the human behavior surrounding her. The people who consider themselves more sophisticated are hardly free of magical thinking: they invest their hopes in medical interventions, technological solutions, and the fantasy that sufficient determination can make loss negotiable. Klara's faith may be sentimentalized, but it also exposes the desperation beneath ostensibly rational forms of belief. The film never fully resolves this parallel, and its score sometimes insists upon feelings that would have been more powerful left unannounced. Yet its emotional generosity has a sincerity that I found difficult to resent. There is a difference between a work that simplifies suffering because it cannot imagine its complexity and one that simplifies it because it longs, perhaps too earnestly, to offer consolation. Waititi's film wavers between the two.

Klara and the Sun is not the profound meditation on artificial consciousness that its premise promises, nor does it achieve the quiet devastation that Ishiguro's approach to human fragility might lead one to expect. Its ideas are underdeveloped, its tonal shifts occasionally awkward, and its emotional cues too often underlined in musical ink. But its imperfections do not cancel its pleasures. I admired its peculiar beauty, its retrofuturist dreaminess, its willingness to be a little ridiculous, and Ortega's delicate attempt to embody a being caught between mechanical construction and emotional possibility. The film sometimes resembles an elaborate toy whose hidden mechanisms remain visible, but there is pleasure in watching it move, and even a certain tenderness in its clumsiness. Perhaps its most revealing contradiction is that a story about the limits of artificial feeling should itself feel so visibly manufactured. I would have welcomed greater ambiguity, greater psychological depth, and more confidence in silence. I would also, quite happily, return to its strange, sunlit world. A film can fall short of greatness and still possess a soul of sorts. This one, imperfectly and unexpectedly, does.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox