Klara and the Sun Release Opens With Tough Reviews

Taika Waititi's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel reaches cinemas on Friday, and the Klara and the Sun release arrives with an unusual mix of anticipation and scepticism. Jenna Ortega plays Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend who waits in a shop window for a family to choose her. Sony Pictures is releasing the film in the United States and the United Kingdom on October 23, after a world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival earlier in October. According to Sony Pictures, the story follows Klara as she meets Josie, a teenager in fragile health, and begins to understand the family that takes her home.

What the film is about

The Klara and the Sun release centres on a machine built to ease loneliness. Klara runs on sunlight and watches the world from a storefront, learning about people before she ever lives with them. Josie, played by Mia Tharia, selects her, and Amy Adams plays Josie's mother, Chrissie. Their household has already suffered a serious loss, and the relationship between mother and daughter is strained. Sony describes Klara's loyalty and sense of wonder as forces that begin to repair that household, a framing that puts companionship ahead of spectacle.

Waititi directed Klara and the Sun and co-wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller, adapting Ishiguro's novel from 2021. Ishiguro, a Nobel Prize winner, also serves as an executive producer. The supporting cast includes Steve Buscemi as a benefactor named Capaldi and Natasha Lyonne as the store manager who first looks after Klara. Aran Murphy plays Rick, Josie's friend. Klara and the Sun is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some violence and strong language, and it runs for 116 minutes. Those details matter for families deciding whether the film suits younger teenagers, since the story deals with illness and grief as much as with futuristic technology.

The world around Klara is deliberately unsettled. Genetic engineering has changed how children are educated and judged, and companions like Klara are sold as a remedy for isolation. Waititi filmed the project in New Zealand, and the production kept a low profile for a long stretch before Sony set the autumn date. That long wait fed curiosity among readers of the novel, who have debated for years whether a quiet, interior book could work on screen at all.

A crowded weekend and a cool reception

The Klara and the Sun release does not arrive alone. The same weekend brings a busy slate to cinemas, including the DC horror film covered in the Clayface box office battle and the large-format success described in the Dune IMAX record story. A literary adaptation with a sombre tone faces a different kind of competition in that company, since it asks audiences to sit with grief and uncertainty rather than offering the jolt of a horror opening or the scale of a franchise event.

Early reviews have been largely negative, and that reception has shaped the conversation around the Klara and the Sun release before most audiences have seen it. Reviewers writing for Deadline, Variety and IndieWire have argued, in reported coverage of the reviews, that Waititi's comic instincts sit uneasily with the sadness at the centre of Ishiguro's story. One Deadline review described the film as flat and only sporadically funny, a verdict that other early notices echoed in different words. The criticism is aimed less at Ortega's performance than at the adaptation itself, with several reviewers saying the film struggles to find a consistent tone in Klara and the Sun.

That response is striking because Waititi built his reputation on comedies with a distinctive voice, including Jojo Rabbit, for which he won an Academy Award for adapted screenplay, and Thor: Ragnarok. His recent work has divided audiences more often, and Klara and the Sun leans further from comedy than either of those titles. Sony's own materials present the Klara and the Sun release as a comedy-drama, a label that sits awkwardly beside the sombre reviews. Viewers who expect the director's familiar humour may instead find a slower film about a machine learning what loss means.

Why the book still draws an audience

Readers have reasons to show up regardless of the early notices. Ishiguro's novel asks what makes a person distinct, and whether a machine that remembers and cares could ever stand in for someone who is gone. Those questions land differently now, when companion chatbots and AI tools are part of daily life for many young people. The Klara and the Sun release gives that debate a face and a voice, even for viewers who have not read the book. Ortega's casting also matters, since her work on Wednesday made her one of the most recognisable young actors working today, and her performance here depends on restraint rather than the sardonic energy of that series.

The film also tests whether a prestige literary adaptation can find room in a market dominated by franchises. Sony announced the project years ago, and the road to release included a long post-production period while Waititi searched for the right tone. The premiere in London on October 15 gave critics their first full look, and the short gap between that screening and the theatrical opening left little time for the studio to change the narrative. For book lovers, that timeline is part of the story, since it suggests a studio that believed in the material enough to finish it on its own terms and then let audiences judge it.

For now, the Klara and the Sun release stands as a gamble on quiet science fiction. It offers no villain to defeat and no twist designed to dominate social media. It offers a robot who looks to the sun for strength, a sick teenager who wants a friend, and a mother trying to protect a child she may lose. Whether audiences embrace that restraint or agree with the early critics will become clear once the weekend figures arrive, but Klara and the Sun has already succeeded at one thing. It has put Ishiguro's question back in front of a mainstream audience: what, if anything, can a machine understand about love?