Klara and the Sun: Taika Waititi plugs Jenna Ortega into Kazuo Ishiguro’s solar-powered soul machine (movie trailer).
Klara and the Sun is heading towards cinemas in 2026, which means humanity has once again looked at the future, seen loneliness, genetic tinkering, artificial companions and ecological unease, and decided the obvious solution is to put Jenna Ortega in a robot frock and hope the sun still takes requests.
The film is directed by Taika Waititi, which immediately raises the interesting question of whether Kazuo Ishiguro’s delicate, sorrowful, solar-powered fable can survive contact with the man who turned Norse gods into space idiots with emotional damage. On paper, this is an odd pairing. Ishiguro writes with the quiet precision of someone rearranging ghosts in a very tidy drawing room. Waititi often directs as though someone has just handed him a megaphone, a kazoo and permission to annoy a god. Yet that may be exactly why this could work. Sometimes melancholy needs a fool at court to stop it collapsing under the weight of its own tasteful wallpaper.
Strictly speaking, Klara and the Sun is not a Japanese novel, despite the tempting shorthand. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, but the novel is an English-language work by the British Nobel laureate, published in 2021 and longlisted for the Booker Prize. It is, however, very much one of those books that seems to have arrived from a polite parallel dimension, where the apocalypse has already happened but everyone is too well brought up to mention the smell.
The story follows Klara, played by Jenna Ortega, an Artificial Friend designed to ease human loneliness. She is solar-powered, observant, innocent and alarmingly sincere, which in a future society makes her roughly as vulnerable as a kitten in a tax audit. Klara is bought to be the companion of Josie, a sickly teenager played by Mia Tharia, whose mother Chrissie, played by Amy Adams, is navigating grief, fear and the sort of parental desperation that makes futuristic consumer technology look suspiciously like a theology department with a warranty.
This is science fiction of the unnerving domestic kind. No one is necessarily firing plasma cannons at Saturn, which will disappoint the lobby of people who believe all SF should involve chrome shoulder pads and admirals shouting about shields. Instead, Ishiguro’s world slips its knife in softly. Some children are “lifted” through genetic enhancement, schooling has retreated into screens, socialisation has become a luxury product, and android companions are sold to children because, apparently, the future has looked at friendship and decided it would work better with a charging cycle.
Klara herself sees the world with a sort of sacred misunderstanding. Because she is solar-powered, the Sun becomes more than weather to her. It is nourishment, benefactor and, eventually, something close to a god. There is something beautifully cracked about this, a machine inventing religion because humans have failed to explain themselves properly. In lesser hands, this could have become a smug little sermon about artificial intelligence. In Ishiguro’s hands, it becomes a strange and tender question: if a machine loves you by design, does that make the love less real, or merely better documented?
Waititi has described this as one of his more dramatic projects, and that is probably wise. Klara and the Sun is not obviously crying out for comedy tentacles, although a little human absurdity may help the medicine slide down. The premise contains plenty of quiet horror already. A child is ill. A mother is afraid. A friend may be replaceable. A society has decided some children deserve enhancement and others can make do with their original factory settings. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Klara looks out at the light and concludes that salvation may be a matter of asking the Sun nicely.
Jenna Ortega as Klara is an interesting choice, not least because audiences currently associate her with gloom, deadpan menace and the sort of stare that makes houseplants apologise. Klara is the opposite, or close to it: open, watchful, almost painfully hopeful. If Ortega can tilt that familiar strangeness away from gothic cool and towards innocent devotion, the performance may become the film’s tiny fusion reactor. A robot who is too human is a cliché. A robot who is not human enough to protect herself from human messiness is much more dangerous.
Amy Adams, meanwhile, brings the kind of emotional voltage that can turn a kitchen scene into a national emergency. As Chrissie, Josie’s mother, she has the harder role: not merely grieving or frightened, but tempted by the most terrible form of hope. In the novel, the question of whether Klara might replace Josie if the worst happens is where the story starts quietly drilling through the reader’s ribcage. This is not a tale about killer robots. It is worse. It is a tale about useful robots, and usefulness is where humans tend to mislay their souls.
Natasha Lyonne appears as the Manager, which feels promising, because if anyone can sell artificial companions while radiating the aura of someone who knows the universe is held together with cigarette ash and bad decisions, it is Lyonne. Steve Buscemi is also involved, and frankly any future dystopia improves by 17 percent the moment Buscemi wanders into it looking as though he has seen three failed civilisations and still has to find somewhere to park.
The film was shot in New Zealand, under the working title Tears and Rain, which sounds either poetic or like a rejected shampoo for replicants. The reported design direction appears to lean into a future that is familiar but slightly displaced, less chrome utopia and more “someone took away the internet and the furniture got nervous”. That is a splendid choice. The most convincing futures are rarely the ones where everything glows blue. They are the ones where yesterday’s curtains are still hanging, but the child in the next room has been genetically upgraded and her best friend came with a receipt.
Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we have a soft spot for science fiction that remembers technology is never really about technology. It is about power, class, grief, desire and the dreadful things people do when they persuade themselves they are being practical. Klara and the Sun has all of that, plus solar worship, artificial friendship and the possibility that a robot may understand love better than the people who bought her.
Whether Waititi can preserve Ishiguro’s quiet ache while adding just enough of his own sideways humanity is the grand question. Too much whimsy and the whole thing could float away wearing a novelty hat. Too much reverence and it may become two hours of extremely tasteful sadness staring out of a window. But somewhere between those poles lies a potentially luminous adaptation: a film about a machine who believes in the Sun, humans who believe in enhancement, and a world where loneliness has become so normal that someone has finally managed to monetise companionship with a straight face.
Klara and the Sun arrives in US cinemas on October 23rd, 2026. Charge your emotional batteries accordingly.
