'Klara and the Sun' Review: What Happens When Taika Waititi Adapts a Heartbreaker

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel ‘Klara and the Sun‘ always seemed like a difficult book to film, a quiet, aching story told through the eyes of a machine that believes the sun can heal. Sony chased it for years, and the adaptation only now reaches theaters after finishing production back in April 2024. I walked in curious, and a little nervous, about how Taika Waititi’s famously quirky voice would sit beside material this delicate.

The premise is simple and lovely. Klara, played by Jenna Ortega, is a solar powered Artificial Friend, a discontinued model sitting in a discount store, who gets her chance when a teenager named Josie, played by Mia Tharia, begs her mother Chrissie, played by Amy Adams, to take her home. The family has suffered a great loss, and Klara’s job is to be the companion who might mend what hurts. Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne round out the cast.

Waititi has called this his most dramatic project yet, which makes the constant joking all the stranger. Here is where the film lost me. The story wants to wound you gently, but the humor and the heartbreak fight each other for the entire runtime, and I never got to sit inside the sadness long enough to feel it.

Scene after scene opens on a delicate emotional beat and then undercuts it with a punchline, so the quiet moments never build any weight. The quirk feels pasted over the story instead of growing out of it, and the result is a tone that never settles.

Ortega deserves credit for committing. She plays Klara as an eager, clumsy innocent, and her physical comedy is the most reliably charming thing in the film. The bond between Klara and Josie has a real sweetness in places, and those are the stretches where the film comes closest to what the novel was reaching for.

The family drama around them feels slimmer than it should. Simon Baker was cast as Josie’s father, but his scenes were cut, and the story feels stripped back for it. At around 2 hours, the film also never quite decides how seriously to take its own world, so the threat hanging over Josie never carries the urgency it needs.

Klara’s faith in the sun is the one thread that feels truly hers, and it is where the film briefly finds the ache Ishiguro built the book around. Those moments are rare, though, and they keep getting interrupted by another joke before they can breathe.

Official trailer for Taika Waititi’s KLARA AND THE SUN. Starring Jenna Ortega, Mia Tharia and Amy Adams. https://t.co/rIm3IZxLI8
— cinesthetic. (@TheCinesthetic) June 22, 2026

I wanted to love this one, and I can see the film it was trying to be, a tender fable about loneliness and what we owe the things that love us. But the clashing tones and the thin emotional payoff left me mostly untouched, and only Ortega’s sincere performance and a few sweet moments kept me from checking out entirely. I give it 4 out of 10.