Name: Klara and the Sun
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Jenna Ortega took Klara and the Sun to Late Night with Seth Meyers as the night’s lead guest, the American leg of a press tour with an unusual message for a film about a robot companion. On red carpets and in junket interviews, the Wednesday star has said she would not want an artificial friend of her own and has asked audiences to put down their phones. The story she is promoting begins in a shop where artificial friends wait to be bought, and Sony’s tagline invites viewers to “meet the future of friendship.”

That gap between the star and the poster is the most revealing thing about this release. Ortega’s refusal is a clear answer to a question Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel left deliberately open: what a machine built to love a child is worth once the child no longer needs her. Most of the critics who saw Taika Waititi’s adaptation in London complain that it reaches for the same comforting answer. MCM’s reading is that Ortega’s “no” is the most honest line of the whole campaign, and the clearest sign of what she wants her career after Wednesday to stand for.

The stakes go beyond one autumn release. Talking to a chatbot that remembers your name has become an ordinary habit, and companionship is one of the things those products openly sell. A film led by the face of Netflix’s Wednesday is, whether it means to be or not, part of that sales conversation. When its star tells her audience that the answer is standing in front of them, the message reaches people who will never open an Ishiguro novel.

What Ortega has said, and where she said it

The clearest statement came at the world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. “I think we gotta put our focus on one another and put down the computers and phones,” Ortega told Variety on the red carpet, adding: “Remember to be present and to appreciate people while they’re standing right in front of you.” To Reuters the same night, she called it “a very timely story” and said that “the answer’s kind of always in one another and listening to one another.”

Asked by Extra whether she would ever want an artificial friend herself, she did not hedge. “No, I don’t think it’s necessary,” she said. “What I love so much about this movie is it takes something artificial to remind people that what’s really important is standing right in front of them and living and breathing and human.” She has also drawn a line between Klara and the AI people use today. “AI I guess pulls all this information from the internet and Klara gets all her information from the real world,” she told Variety, describing the character as “kind of like a toddler in a sense” and saying Waititi wanted movement that was “more sort of clumsy and unknowing.”

NBC taped the Late Night conversation in advance and aired it after midnight on the East Coast, with Ina Garten as the second guest, according to Headline Planet. The network had not posted the interview online when this piece was written, so nothing here claims to report what Ortega told Seth Meyers. The argument rests on what she has said on the record elsewhere, and on that record she has been consistent.

A campaign that sells the friend and the off switch

Everyone in front of the camera has been delivering the same sermon. Waititi told Reuters he wanted the film to “remind people to put the devices down, not because there’s a threat or anything, but just put the thing down because it’s a distraction, and just be with the people you’re with.” Amy Adams, who plays Chrissie, the mother who brings Klara home for her sick daughter Josie, tied it to an earlier role. “I did ‘Her’ and I did this film and both times you think when you’re making the film that this is so far in the future and yet, here we are having this discussion,” she told Extra.

The marketing tells a gentler story. The tagline is “Meet the future of friendship.” One teaser is titled “Powered by sunshine,” a featurette “Instant Connection.” Reuters describes Klara as “programmed to prevent loneliness.” The pitch to the ticket buyer is a lovable machine that mends a sad household. The pitch from the stage is that you should not need one. The poster sells the friend. The star sells the off switch.

Ishiguro has noticed the ground moving under his book. “This film doesn’t address a lot of the anxieties that you and I may have right now about where we’re going with the technology,” he told Variety at the premiere, adding that he was “aware that this film is coming out into a very different world to the one that my novel came out in.” He also offered a defence of what it does instead: “this isn’t another film about how an AI machine seems to be nice and then becomes sinister and ends up killing all the nice people in the film.”

What the critics say went missing

London’s critics were not kind. At the time of writing the film held 25% on Rotten Tomatoes from 12 reviews and a Metacritic score of 27 from nine. In Variety, Guy Lodge wrote that Ortega, “innately charismatic as ever,” tries to give Klara weight but “is defeated by the one-note writing of her character as a relentlessly hopeful, Pollyanna-esque naif,” and predicted the film would have “all the cultural staying power of a standard ChatGPT conversation.” Peter Bradshaw’s one-star review in The Guardian said it “winds up saying nothing substantial or meaningful (or funny) about artificial intelligence, love or grief.”

The sharpest complaint lines up almost exactly with the tour’s slogan. “The book was about who we fundamentally are, now and tomorrow,” Clarisse Loughrey wrote in The Independent. “The film is about the power of love and friendship. That seems like quite the downgrade.” The novel’s most unsettling idea, a mother’s plan for the machine to study her daughter so closely that it could carry her on if she dies, is a question with no comfortable answer. Love and friendship is an answer. So is putting down the phone.

Ortega herself has largely been spared. Screen Daily’s Dave Calhoun predicted that “many should warm to Jenna Ortega’s endearing performance as Klara, especially those who admire her from the Netflix series Wednesday,” and even Lodge’s pan treats her as the film’s best asset. The verdict on the film and the verdict on its lead have already come apart.

The case for the comforting answer

The defence deserves a fair hearing, and it is better than the reviews suggest. Klara and the Sun is a PG-13 studio film with a young audience, many of whom know Ortega from Wednesday and will meet Ishiguro here for the first time. For that viewer, a story in which a machine helps a family remember how to look at one another may do more good than a seminar on machine consciousness. Adams told Variety that everyone she had spoken to got “something different” out of it. Ortega’s distinction between Klara and internet-fed AI is fair too: in the novel, Klara learns by watching the street from a shop window, and her faith in the sun is closer to a child’s than to a data model’s. A warm film about a warm machine is not a contradiction.

MCM parts company with that defence on one point, and Ortega raised it herself. If the answer is always in one another, the artificial friend is a detour, and the film’s own premise is a product nobody should buy. Ishiguro’s novel lets readers love Klara and still see how the household uses her. A campaign that wants audiences to adore Klara and then walk out resolved never to want one is asking for two feelings at once. Ortega chose one of them in public, and it was the less commercial one.

That choice also reads as career strategy. Ortega told Esquire she had been in an “experimental phase” and now wanted “stories and characters that I feel truly connected to,” and called Klara “this naive, hopeful, optimistic character who’s very different than the characters that I’ve been playing recently.” An actor known for deadpan and horror is using a soft role to say something sincere in her own voice. Even Ishiguro’s next project passes close to her: he told Variety he has written a script for Tim Burton, who directed her in Wednesday, and insisted that “Jenna didn’t introduce us.”

What is on the record, and what is MCM’s reading

On the record: Ortega was the lead guest on a pre-taped episode of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers that also featured Ina Garten. Her quoted remarks come from Variety and Reuters at the London premiere on October 15, from Extra and from Esquire. Sony opens the film in the United States and the United Kingdom on October 23, within a global rollout that begins on October 21. The review scores were checked on October 20 and will move as more critics weigh in. Not established: what Ortega said to Seth Meyers, and how the film handles the novel’s darkest material, which MCM has not seen. The claim that the tour argues against the product the marketing sells is our interpretation of those public statements.

Klara is built to say yes to whoever picks her out of the shop window. The most useful thing her star has said on this tour is the one word Klara was never designed to say.

Tags: Taika Waititi, Jenna Ortega, Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro, AI companions, Late Night with Seth Meyers