Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun is being treated as a stumble, with the film described as muddled and poorly received. The project takes Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about an artificial friend and turns it into a story that seems to lose the book’s harder edge on the way to the screen.
That is why readers are looking now: a high-profile film built around Jenna Ortega as Klara and Mia Tharia as Josie has not landed the way a major adaptation is supposed to. Tharia’s Josie is the 14-year-old at the center of the story, and the character’s blunt line — “It’s just a burning ball of fire that can’t think or feel” — cuts against the film’s gentler mood in a way that seems to matter more than any polished publicity campaign.
In Ishiguro’s novel, Klara is chosen by a lonely teenager living in a vaguely located future where parents can have their children genetically modified, or “lifted,” to help them get ahead. The procedure carries real risk, and Klara eventually learns that Josie is dying because of complications from it. She then tries to save her by appealing to the sun, whose rays give Klara her power. That setup is one reason the story has always been difficult to flatten into easy optimism: it is about hope, but also about disease, inequality and the price of wanting a child to be exceptional in the first place.
The film seems to move away from that discomfort. It gives Klara the reassurance that the sun will heal Josie, then swamps the novel’s delicate existential questions in whimsy and a sentimentality that feels almost mandatory. It does not seem especially interested in whether Klara is deluded, and it leans on the idea of a “dream” as Josie defines it — “anything you want to happen, really bad.” The result is a version of the story that keeps finding ways to be sweet when the book was built to stay unresolved.
That shift matters because Waititi is not coming to this with no reputation for adaptation work. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2020 for Jojo Rabbit, and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, another reminder that his fiction has long been a difficult fit for straightforward screen treatment. For now, the problem with Klara and the Sun is not just that it has been received poorly. It is that the film appears to have softened the very ideas that made the book worth adapting in the first place.
For readers following the movie’s prospects, that leaves one blunt question: whether this adaptation can find any audience beyond curiosity, or whether its attempt to turn a bleak, searching novel into a feel-good fable has already sealed its fate.
