Klara and the Sun Review: Waititi's Tender Sci-Fi

Klara (Ortega) is an Artificial Friend - an AI companion sold in a store run by the wonderfully deadpan Manager (Natasha Lyonne). Klara isn't like the other AFs; she's curious, observant, and weirdly spiritual about the Sun, which she genuinely believes is a living, benevolent force. When she's chosen by Josie (Mia Tharia), a teenage girl battling a mysterious illness, Klara enters a household quietly falling apart. Josie's mother Chrissie (Amy Adams) is desperate and controlling, the family is grieving a loss we slowly piece together, and neighbor boy Rick (Aran Murphy) hovers on the edges of Josie's shrinking world. Klara's job is simple: be there for Josie. Her devotion becomes something far stranger and more profound.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: this is a Klara and the Sun review, and yes, it's based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel - the same author who gave us Never Let Me Go, so you already know the vibe. Melancholy. Existential. A slow knife twist rather than a gut punch. Waititi leans into that, stripping away his usual kinetic energy for something patient and observational. The camera frequently sits at Klara's eye level, and the film asks us to see the world the way she does - literally, since she has a somewhat fractured way of processing what she witnesses.

Ortega is the whole show, and she's terrific. Playing an AI without going full robot-mime is tricky - too stiff and it's a gimmick, too loose and you forget she's a machine. Ortega threads it, giving Klara a wide-eyed sincerity that's almost childlike, and the movie's best moments are just her watching, absorbing, trying to make sense of human grief she can't fully compute. Amy Adams does strong work as a mother whose love has curdled into something colder and more calculating, and Tharia is a real find as Josie - fragile without being precious. Steve Buscemi pops up in a small role that I won't spoil, and honestly, more movies should just quietly insert Steve Buscemi into scenes and let the audience deal with it.

Where it stumbles is pacing. At 116 minutes, it sometimes feels longer, lingering on quiet moments that don't always earn their length. Waititi's restraint occasionally tips into inertia - there are stretches where the film seems to be waiting for something to happen alongside its characters. The third act takes a swing that's thematically rich but emotionally a bit murky, and I suspect viewers will split on whether it lands. It's also worth noting the TMDb rating sits at a flat 0/10 as of release - that's just an empty scoreboard, folks, not a verdict. Don't read anything into it.

What the film gets right is its central idea: that devotion, even from something artificial, can be a kind of grace. Klara's faith in the Sun is silly and beautiful and honestly kind of moving, and the movie never patronizes her for it. It's a story about a family in mourning being held together by a machine that loves them more purely than they can love each other. That's a good idea for a movie, and for long stretches, this is a good movie.

Pros

• Jenna Ortega's Klara is an all-timer AI performance - sincere, strange, and heartbreaking
• Amy Adams and Mia Tharia ground the family drama with real emotional weight
• Waititi's restrained direction lets the melancholy breathe
• A thoughtful, uncynical take on love and sacrifice

Cons

• The pacing drags in the middle stretch
• The third-act twist will divide audiences
• Some quiet scenes linger past their usefulness
• Rick's subplot feels underdeveloped