Klara and the Sun Opens to Brutal Reviews

Klara and the Sun opens in theaters on Friday, and the reviews are brutal. The Jenna Ortega sci-fi drama, adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, premiered at the BFI London Film Festival to some of the harshest notices of the year, yet the film's star keeps getting singled out as its saving grace.

The split is striking. According to ComingSoon, which rounded up the early notices, critics called the film everything from a "garbled mess" to "the most infantile film of the year," and the movie is sitting in the high twenties on Metacritic. But nearly every pan finds room to praise Ortega's physical, wide-eyed performance as an android built to be a child's companion. Audiences deciding whether to spend their Friday night at the multiplex are getting a rare clear signal: the movie may be a mess, but the lead is not the problem.

What the movie actually is

The story follows Klara, an Artificial Friend from a now-obsolete model line who waits in a store window hoping to be chosen. When a teenager named Josie picks her, Klara moves in with the family and tries to make sense of grief, devotion and what it means to love someone you can never fully become. The film comes from Sony Pictures and runs just under two hours, carrying a PG-13 rating.

Behind the camera is Taika Waititi, the New Zealand filmmaker behind Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller. The cast around Ortega includes Amy Adams as Josie's mother, Mia Tharia as Josie, and supporting turns from Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne. The source material is one of the most decorated novels of the decade, written by a Nobel Prize-winning author, which is exactly why the reviews sting as much as they do.

Why critics are so harsh

The central complaint is that the adaptation sanded down everything that made the book interesting. "The book was about who we fundamentally are, now and tomorrow. The film is about the power of love and friendship. That seems like quite the downgrade," wrote Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent, in one of the most quoted lines of the review cycle. David Jenkins of Little White Lies called the result "a garbled mess of half-cocked speculative sci-fi and sentimental platitudes," while Kevin Maher of The Times labeled it "a hopeless film, slippery and mendacious." Tim Robey of The Telegraph went further, calling it "excruciatingly misjudged" and possibly the year's most infantile release.

The drubbing continues a rough run for its lead. ScreenRant noted that Ortega's last five films have landed in mixed-to-negative territory, stretching back through Death of a Unicorn and Hurry Up Tomorrow, with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice standing as her most recent broadly liked release. The same outlet reported that early box office projections have the film opening in the six-to-ten-million-dollar range, a modest start that would put it well behind the weekend's bigger swings.

The case for seeing it anyway

Not everyone hated it. One early review from MamaRazziKnowsBest called it "a beautiful, thought-provoking film," praising Ortega for giving Klara "an innocence and humanity that make her impossible not to love" and crediting the director with balancing humor against a moving story about family. The reviewer went in thinking about artificial intelligence and left thinking about what makes people human, which is arguably the entire point of the novel.

There is also a track-record argument. Audiences have consistently been kinder to Ortega's recent films than critics were, with moviegoers rating her 2025 releases well above their critical scores. A divided response is practically the house style for a polarizing book adaptation like Klara and the Sun, and horror-tinged sci-fi has a long history of finding its audience after critics move on. The film's themes also land differently in 2026 than they did when the novel was published: an android purchased to keep a lonely teenager company reads less like speculative fiction and more like a slightly exaggerated version of the AI companion debate already happening in group chats everywhere.

What the opening weekend will decide

The timing is unforgiving. The film opens the same Friday as DC's R-rated body-horror entry Clayface and the Laika animated feature Wildwood, in a Halloween corridor where horror has been the year's most reliable genre. For more on how the DC horror bet is playing, our earlier look at the film's hard-R marketing push breaks down why the studio is aiming at horror fans first. And if the weekend's other big swing interests you, the documentary that stunned with a fifteen-million-dollar debut is still expanding on word of mouth.

For Ortega, the stakes are personal as well as commercial. Another lead performance buried under a critical pile-on would extend a slump that has followed one of Gen Z's most bankable young stars for the better part of two years. But if audiences show up the way they did for her last two films, the weekend could rewrite the narrative from flop to cult favorite in a single frame. Either way, Friday's numbers will tell us whether the year's most divisive book adaptation is a cautionary tale or a slow-burn success story.