Ortega glows as a solar robot - but the film loses power too soon

Klara and the Sun (M, 116 minutes)

⭐⭐⭐

Taika Waititi and Kazuo Ishiguro are two juggernauts of contemporary popular culture, and so this dreamy adaptation of Ishiguro's 2021 novel by the Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople director feels like it should be a surefire hit, and it very nearly is.

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Jenna Ortega in Klara and the Sun. Picture Sony Pictures

With Jenna Ortega in the lead as an optimistic robot outgrowing her programming, Klara and the Sun has an air of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands about it, a futuristic fairy tale with a moral heart.

The year is sometime in the not-very-distant future and the opening scenes show a crowded and dirty city. Across the road from a store selling state-of-the-art Artificial Friends, designed to babysit children and give the lonely somebody to talk to, is a run-down retail outlet selling superseded models of Artificial Friends.

Rotating the models through the display window gives one of the AFs, the solar-powered Klara (Jenna Ortega), a literal moment in the sun.

There's something quirky about the wiring in Klara, because she keeps asking existential questions to the polite frustration of the store manager (Natasha Lyonne).

Luckily for Klara, passing by and noticing her is Josie (Mia Tharia), a sickly teenage girl whose mother Chrissy (Amy Adams) has promised her a robot companion from the flash store across the street, but having taken notice of Klara's inner light, Josie only wants her.

At Chrissy's farmhouse outside the city, Klara takes some time adjusting to her surroundings and learning the family dynamics.

There's a boy (Aran Murphy) from a neighbouring farm, into robotics and who Josie is into.

And there's the Sun, the giant ball of light Klara glimpsed only momentarily while in the store. Out here in the country, Klara develops her own relationship with the Sun, and turns to it for help when she learns that Josie has a terminal illness.

Jenna Ortega and Natasha Lyonne in Klara and the Sun. Picture Sony Pictures

Waititi filmed Klara in Auckland almost two years ago, the delay perhaps due to Waititi's jam-packed dance card.

You do have to wonder, though, if the producers used the time trying to edit the film's second half into something with more emotional resonance, because it doesn't quite get there.

In those two years, young Aran Murphy, son of Cillian, has become a bit of a thing, because he's since filmed two of the bigger shows on streaming right now - he plays Sharon Horgan's son in Youth and Sienna Miller's son in War, both on HBO.

Jenna Ortega does a wonderful job as a supposedly unfeeling artificial being discovering emotions, and finding she has a few of her own.

While this film seems to be copping a bit of a critical beating - unfairly I think - the Klara role will only add to Ortega's title as the queen of subversive and kooky performances. She plays the robot like a puppy, strong on physical comedy.

The film looks exquisite, not just for the glorious New Zealand countryside though that of course helps cinematographer Michael Berlucchi with the pristine rural scenes (and their hints of the apocalypse they grew out of, with tanks and other artillery buried below the wheat fields).

Taika Waititi is an exceptional director of some of the best recent cinema from our part of the world, but it feels like he's been hired to add an unnecessary and quirky uplift to what is a darkly melancholic film.

Those familiar with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go - the two books are great companion pieces about what it means to be human - would agree the moral message doesn't need the whimsical window-dressing.

In the screenplay by Waititi and Dahvi Waller there is lightness where there doesn't need to be - particularly Amy Adams' character throwing off witty bon-mots while grieving.

Nevertheless, this is a lovely film with a great big heart.

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