Name: Klara and the Sun
Director: Taika Waititi
Genre: Science Fiction, Drama, Comedy
Released: 2026-10-15T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 116 min
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Mia Tharia, Amy Adams, Natasha Lyonne, Aran Murphy

In one of the publicity stills for Klara and the Sun, the light does the talking. A figure with a dark, blunt bob sits at a farmhouse window between two floral curtains, a cassette radio on the sill, and beyond the glass a low sun rests on a ridge of hills. The figure is Klara, the solar-powered Artificial Friend played by Jenna Ortega, and that sun is not set dressing. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel it is what she runs on, and what she comes to believe in.

Taika Waititi’s adaptation reaches cinemas this week carrying two weights at once. One is the book, the first novel Ishiguro published after his Nobel Prize, a quiet story about a machine that watches a family more closely than its members watch one another. The other is the reception at the BFI London Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere as a gala and several critics answered with one-star reviews. Waititi calls it his most dramatic film. Much of the London press saw a comedy that does not land and a drama that never commits.

An Artificial Friend for the Wednesday audience

Casting Ortega as Klara is the film’s clearest statement of intent. In the novel Klara narrates, and her careful, literal attention is the texture of the whole book; on screen the role goes to the actor a generation knows as Wednesday Addams, a performer whose screen persona is built on deadpan. 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.” Ortega told Reuters at the premiere that “it felt like a very timely story,” and told the PA news agency that the script “was different than a lot of the scripts that I was receiving at the time.”

Around her, the film builds a household. Mia Tharia plays Josie, the wealthy teenager who chooses Klara from a shop window, and Amy Adams plays her mother, Chrissie, with Rachel House as the wary housekeeper Melania. Adams frames the part as a study in fault rather than warmth. “What’s fascinating about this (film) is playing a mother who makes questionable choices,” she told PA, adding that she got “to explore somebody who is very deeply flawed.” Natasha Lyonne plays the Store Manager, and Steve Buscemi appears as Capaldi, described in Deadline’s review as a mysterious benefactor.

A director who wanted his most dramatic film

Waititi built his reputation on sincerity smuggled inside a joke. It carried Jojo Rabbit, the satire that made him an Oscar winner, and it is the register critics expected him to bring to Ishiguro. He pitched this one differently. “She’s a machine who comes into the world of a broken family and somehow teaches them the importance of being human,” he said on the London carpet, adding: “There’s some funny bits there, but it’s probably my most dramatic film.” He has also admitted to underestimating the job, telling Vanity Fair: “I thought that this would be maybe the easiest film I’d ever make, because when I first read the book, I was like, I can make this film. It’s going to be easy—nothing happens.”

That last line names the real problem at the centre of the project. Ishiguro writes in omission: restraint, things left unsaid, a narrator who reports more than she understands. The screenplay, credited to Dahvi Waller and Waititi, has to turn that withholding into scenes, and the premise suggests where the weight falls. Klara’s faith in the sun is the one engine of the plot that belongs entirely to her, and Sony’s marketing leans on it, from a teaser titled “Powered by sunshine” to the tagline “Meet the future of friendship.” Waititi argues the subject is urgent: “It’s vital right now because we’re now in a moment where we’re maybe on the cusp of losing control of our relationship with technology.”

What London’s critics could not forgive

The festival verdict is close to unanimous, and it is aimed at tone. Peter Bradshaw, giving it one star in The Guardian, called it “a slice of sentimental whimsy-futurism and non-satire” that “winds up saying nothing substantial or meaningful (or funny) about artificial intelligence, love or grief.” Deadline’s Damon Wise found a “curiously flat comedy-drama,” and David Jenkins of Little White Lies faulted Waititi’s “juvenile habit of undercutting any hint at profundity with a jolt of silly humour or a comic rug pull.” The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey put the case most cleanly: “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.”

The defence exists, and it rests on surfaces. Calhoun praised “strong performances and imaginative visuals” and “a distinctive otherworldly tone,” while warning that “something is lost by widening the story beyond Klara’s tight perspective.” James Mottram, giving it three stars in the South China Morning Post, described “a sunny-side-up sci-fi fable that occasionally delivers flashes of darkness.” Neither review answers the larger question the release raises. Sony kept the finished film on its shelf for more than two years after the shoot, and nothing in the rollout explains what changed beyond the calendar. The aggregate scores are early, built on 12 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes and 9 at Metacritic, but they point the same way: 25% and 27.

From a preemptive deal to a wide release

The project began as a wager on Ishiguro before the novel was even in shops. Elizabeth Gabler’s 3000 Pictures, the Sony-backed label, closed a preemptive deal for the book in 2020, with David Heyman of Heyday Films producing. Waititi entered negotiations to direct in 2023 and shot the film in New Zealand from January to April 2024 under the working title Tears and Rain. Then it waited, until Sony dated it at CinemaCon in April. Heyman, Waititi and Garrett Basch produce, Ishiguro is an executive producer, and the cast also includes Aran Murphy as Rick.

Jenna Ortega as Klara running through a harvested wheat field in Klara and the Sun, directed by Taika Waititi — Jenna Ortega as Klara in *Klara and the Sun* (2026), directed by Taika Waititi

Klara and the Sun runs 116 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the US and 12A in the UK. Sony opens it wide in the United States and the United Kingdom on October 23, 2026, through Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Releasing, as part of a global rollout that starts on October 21; Australia gets it a day before the US, on October 22. No streaming date has been announced.

Ishiguro’s Klara spends the novel bargaining with the sun, certain it will help if she offers the right thing. Waititi’s film now makes the same bargain with audiences, after the critics in London said no.