While Taika Waititi is no stranger to vampires, in his latest film, Klara and the Sun, he has unfortunately sucked all of the life out of its source material, the 2021 dystopian sci-fi novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. He doesn’t stop there, however. On top of draining the story of substance, Waititi slaps on some tacky window dressing, inflates it with flat jokes, and scatters his script with stilted dialogue.

The film follows Klara (Jenna Ortega), an Artificial Friend, as she goes from wasting away at a robo-boutique to finally finding a home with a young girl named Josie (Mia Tharia). Josie lives alone with her mom, Chrissie (Amy Adams), in an eclectically decorated, elaborate ranch, plopped in the middle of a wheat field. It’s one of the visualizations that works well in the film. The contrast between this highly curated home and the plainness of its setting echoes the differences between Josie and Klara. Like many other children in this world, Chrissie decided to have her daughter “lifted,”  making her more likely to succeed in a world of robots. Klara, however, is an outdated model and not quite capable of what you might expect from an intelligent robot of the future.

It’s revealed that Josie is terminally ill from complications of the lifting procedure and part of Klara’s purpose is to console her. Through following Josie, Klara sees what real love looks like for the first time. She also discovers a nonsentient combine harvester in the fields, which acts as the film’s villain for the first half (which works about as well narratively as you’d think it would). Klara also meets another AF like her, standing in the middle of the field like a scarecrow.

The artificially intelligent scarecrow is a character Waititi decided to add to his adaptation and, ironically, an apt comparison for the film itself. Klara and the Sun is scaring audiences and theaters away. Instead of standing in an empty field, we face an empty theater. If we rip the stitching to examine its insides, we won’t find the typical substance that makes a thing work well. Worse, it’s stuffed with crossed wires with frayed endings – all the unnecessary stuffing, fluff, and debris that Waititi has crammed into Ishiguro’s original story.

The character of Klara operates differently in the film than she does in the novel. In the book, we see everything through Klara’s perspective, which is thoughtful, curious, and naive. Due to her limited knowledge of the world, Klara is an unreliable narrator, but a faithful one in relation to her own interpretations of the world. Waititi leans heavily on Klara’s perspective but misses the chance to explore how a filmic version of this story could enhance its themes. This was an opportunity to explore the human characters just as much as the artificial ones, given that we will see the humans anyway — unlike the book. The movie could have focused more on how others view this strange dystopian world and their response to Klara’s peculiarities as an Artificial Friend. Instead, the human characters feel like an afterthought and come across as more artificial than Klara and her cohorts.

Ortega infuses Klara with a strong sense of self and gives a solid performance, given the material she had to work with. Unfortunately, she feels like the only character given any real background. It’s not that a filmmaker has to be faithful to every written word. Waititi largely is, pulling some monologues verbatim from the book. But it’s what he adds to Ishiguro’s story that ends up detracting from what made it great in the first place. His version of AFs are hokey, unbelievable, and, at times, perverse. Their interactions together in the store are presented as slapstick humor, robbing the characters of their literary subtlety and nuance. Waititi spends so much effort amping up the quirk factor of the robots that the human characters suffer.

In a world increasingly more concerned with supporting the infrastructure of artificial intelligence than basic human needs, Waititi is sending mixed messages, whether he means to or not. Perhaps its financial failure at the box office is partially due to it being filmed over two years ago. A lot has changed with both filmmaking and AI since early 2024. Films that engage with this subject matter have more at stake than other themes, like, say, superheroes or vampires.

The disappointment of Klara and the Sun could also be chalked up to a director’s own quirky style of filmmaking being ill-suited to an author’s unassuming, precise writing style. Either way, it’s simply the flipside of the coin that is the art of adaptation, in an age where at least we are still turning to books for ideas and not solely ChatGPT.

Review Courtesy of Kasey Dunifer

Feature Image Credit to Columbia Pictures