Leave your brain at the door. While Ishiguro transports you through crisp, powerful prose in his celebrated dystopian fable, Waititi, by contrast, hits you with relentless whimsy and crushing sentimentality—in what feels like an inadvertent bid to get himself permanently blacklisted from the film industry.
Leave your brain at the door—unless you want your IQ pulverized—should you choose to watch Taika Waititi’s bafflingly disastrous and cloying adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s *Klara and the Sun*. Starring Jenna Ortega as Klara—an "Artificial Friend" (AF) powered by solar energy who begins to develop human emotions through her overexposure to generic, profoundly foolish human feelings—the film shapes up to be this year’s equivalent of *A Big Bold Beautiful Journey*: another failure backed by a renowned director that, quite unintentionally, brings him closer to being blacklisted by the industry.
Director: Taika Waititi
Writers: Taika Waititi, Dahvi Waller, Kazuo Ishiguro
Stars: Aran Murphy, Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams
While Ishiguro—the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-British author known for *The Remains of the Day* and *Never Let Me Go*—writes with precise, melancholic prose anchored in ambiguous emotions, Waititi fills the gaps with pastel-colored set design, excessive doses of whimsy, and clumsy physical comedy that undermines any attempt—already tepid at best—to achieve any real depth. A case in point is the scene where two characters rush to rescue Klara from a burning building, only to end up getting shocked by an electric fence—at least three times, if not more.
Michael Giacchino’s score, heavy with an ill-fitting pathos, underscores these ridiculous lapses and perfectly crystallizes the miscalculated clash of tones present in every frame—just as the film seems to be building toward a grand emotional climax. *Klara and the Sun* suffers from a pathological allergy to sincerity; it approaches fundamental existential questions with cloying sentimentality and, worse yet, an utter lack of curiosity.
This new "dystopian future world that mirrors our own" features—naturally—rigidly stratified class structures, bespoke genetic engineering accessible only to the ultra-wealthy, and highly sentient artificial intelligence. Such is the case with Klara, a companion android—a B2 model—who has become obsolete. Outwardly, she appears human, but inside, she is nothing more than wires and a dark, oil-like fluid. A technical glitch suggests that Klara is ready to be taken off the market: she cannot stop balancing on one leg in the "tree pose." It is a programming error—a recurring gag that Waititi returns to again and again—that serves no purpose other than to drive the viewer up the wall. Klara spends her final days—which are numbered, as she is destined to be returned to the factory for destruction—longing for the "super-nutritious food" provided by the sunbeams filtering through the grate that separates the shop from the city center.
If you decide to watch *Klara and the Sun*—Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, a bafflingly bad film that is cloying to the point of nausea—you had better leave your brain at the door, unless you want to see your IQ pulverized. The film stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, an "Artificial Friend" (AF) that runs on solar energy. Upon being exposed to human emotions—emotions as crude as they are profoundly stupid—Klara begins to internalize them. In essence, this is the equivalent of this year’s *A Big Bold Beautiful Journey*: another failure backed by a renowned director, marking yet another step toward professional ostracism.
While Ishiguro—the Japanese-British Nobel laureate known for works such as *The Remains of the Day* and *Never Let Me Go*—writes in a precise, melancholic prose anchored in ambiguous emotions, Waititi fills those spaces with pastel-colored set design, an excess of whimsical fantasy, and clumsy physical comedy. This undermines any attempt—already tepid to begin with—to achieve any real depth. One example is the scene in which two characters rush to rescue Klara from a burning building, only to end up being shocked by an electric fence—at least three times, if not more.
Michael Giacchino’s score, with its exaggeratedly dramatic tone, underscores these absurd missteps and highlights a poorly conceived clash of sensibilities present in every frame—just as the film seems to be building toward a major emotional climax. *Klara and the Sun* suffers from a pathological allergy to sincerity: it approaches fundamental existential questions with cloying sentimentality and, worse still, an absolute lack of intellectual curiosity. This new, dystopian future—which serves as a reflection of our own—is defined by, naturally, class structures.
When the blinds are raised and the store manager (played by Natasha Lyonne—appearing, I believe, as herself) opens the shop, Klara and her fellow androids must strike a pose in the storefront—in a "dance, little monkey, dance!" sort of way—to attract potential buyers. However, those buyers are already dazzled and distracted by the gleaming, novel appearance of the B3 models—which have undergone a kind of "aesthetic enhancement"—on display across the street. Fortunately for Klara, a very lonely and gravely ill girl named Josie (Mia Tharia) wants to buy her, much to the displeasure of her mother, Chrissie—a dismissive and overbearing woman.
Josie and her mother—who is raising her alone—live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, where the greatest threat (and, it seems, the film’s primary villain) is an autonomous combine harvester manufactured by a company called Cootings. An only child, Josie has undergone a genetic "enhancement" process designed to transform what might have been a tendency toward underperformance into a flash of brilliance. She paints masterpieces and reads great novels, day and night, while Chrissie prepares her daughter for admission to the Atlas Brookings school, an institution for gifted children.
Klara—whose philosophical musings elevate the Sun to the status of a living deity, and who is also capable of perfectly mimicking the voice or temperament of any human being upon command—quickly forms a close friendship with the girl. But the "enhancement" procedure has caused a neurological disorder in Josie—the specifics of which remain unspecified—that manifests when she, Klara, and Rick (Aran Murphy)—a friend of Josie’s—go for a ride in Chrissie’s autonomous Buick.
One moment, they are roaming the fields, completely carefree and joyful; the next, a sharp cut reveals a car smashed into a tree, with Josie in a coma, lying in bed and hooked up to various tubes. This sudden shift is jarring—as if the editors, Adam Gough and Tom Eagles, had excised a significant chunk of the footage. Or are Waititi and co-writer Dahvi Waller deliberately withholding information, as a sort of snub to the audience? In truth, one is left wondering what exactly just happened; furthermore, whenever the camera shifts to Klara’s first-person perspective—a view that shakes violently and appears to be shared by Josie—the narrative confusion only deepens, rather than offering any clarity.
Steve Buscemi plays a Dr. Frankenstein-esque character who holds the key to solving the medical mystery afflicting Josie; it is up to him whether Chrissie can keep her daughter alive should the young girl fail to survive her next nosebleed. From this point on, *Klara and the Sun* evolves into a strange *pas de deux* between Chrissie and Klara while Josie recovers. At one point, a fed-up Chrissie attempts to stuff Klara back into the—increasingly battered—cardboard box from which she first emerged; finding that the box won’t close, she snaps, "Up you get, Daisy!" "Who is Daisy?" Klara asks.
The film’s strained attempts at humor are, frankly, devoid of any spark and prove irritating; at times, the movie seems to morph into a perverse—and perhaps self-aware—treatise on extreme mawkishness. But that would be giving the film far too much intellectual credit. The New Zealand filmmaker has never been an artist who takes his source material too seriously. One need only recall how he turned fascism into an Oscar-worthy farce in *Jojo Rabbit*, which won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In this instance, his direction—clumsy, full of winks to the audience, affected, and constantly sabotaging itself—fails even to elicit a strong performance from the charming Jenna Ortega; her character, Klara, is reduced to little more than a collection of eccentric mannerisms, both physical and verbal.
Ortega displays great magnetism in the Netflix series *Wednesday*, but her recent film work—from the exhausting art-world satire *The Gallerist* (screened at Sundance) and The Weeknd’s disastrous project *Hurry Up Tomorrow* to A24’s failed attempt at a monster franchise, *Death of a Unicorn*—suggests that her talent is being, quite astonishingly, squandered on the big screen. (Hopefully, however, Mary Bronstein—writer and director of *If I Had Legs I’d Kick You*—will come to the rescue with her upcoming film.) For a movie packed with AI-powered autonomous vehicles, this *Klara* goes nowhere—except straight toward disaster, and without a shred of intelligence to be found.
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