Waititi’s Klara and the Sun draws sharply mixed critical verdicts

Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun brings Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about an android companion to the screen, with Jenna Ortega playing Klara, who is enlisted to befriend a teenage girl. The film’s central premise asks what human connection means when a machine can appear to understand it. Amy Adams also stars, alongside Mia Tharia, Natasha Lyonne and Steve Buscemi.

The reviews share an interest in the story’s sadness and its ideas about human feeling, but they disagree in emphasis about how successfully the film realizes them. The Hollywood Reporter delivers the sharpest verdict, calling it the worst screen adaptation of an Ishiguro novel.

It faults the film’s whimsical approach and score, and says Ortega’s performance does not convey Klara’s wonder and confusion convincingly. The Sydney Morning Herald is also strongly critical, calling the film annoying, but leaves room for an emotional response: its sadness, the review says, might bring viewers to tears. The A.V.

Review focuses on the divide between ambition and execution, describing a visually beautiful film with philosophical aims that struggles to balance its whimsical manner with the underlying sadness. Across these assessments, the disagreement is not over the novel’s melancholy premise but over whether the adaptation makes that premise affecting or frustrating.

The Sydney Morning Herald connects the film’s sadness to Ishiguro’s story; The A.V. Review likewise sees a profoundly sad narrative at odds with the movie’s lighter sensibility. The Hollywood Reporter instead stresses the result’s misjudged tone and Ortega’s difficulty finding emotional depth in Klara.

The film is rated M and has a running time of 117 minutes, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams attended a special screening in New York, and the film is set for theatrical release on October 23, according to Hindustan Times.

The coverage thus presents a film with a clear emotional and philosophical ambition but sharply contested execution: one reviewer allows that its sadness may move audiences, while the other assessments foreground a mismatch between its ideas, tone and performance. The reviews offer no shared verdict on whether that tension ultimately works for viewers.