Taika Waititi’s ‘Klara and the Sun’ Doesn’t Understand Kazuo Ishiguro’s Book

An age when many people are convinced robots will eventually destroy us all probably isn’t the ideal moment for Taika Waititi’s feel-good adaptation of Klara and the Sun, wherein an Artificial Friend (Jenna Ortega) helps her grief-stricken owners realize, “It’s okay to be broken.” True, Ishiguro’s 2021 sci-fi novel was prescient in anticipating a loneliness epidemic that would put us under the thrall of machines programmed to approximate human conversation. But Waititi, who wrote and directed the film, forgoes any attempt to capture the book’s existential depth, offering a manic, lighthearted robot romp instead.

Apparently, the awkward marriage between solemn source material and Waititi’s quirky tone was intentional. When Vanity Fair caught up with Ishiguro last week, he described his own book as “bleak.” For the film, however, he wanted something different: He sought out Waititi’s “kind of wacky, bordering on surreal humor.” The Nobel Prize laureate compared this adaptation, which hits theaters October 23, to an artist covering a song and making it their own. Unfortunately, not all covers are Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” To get a sense of how very different these tunes are, read on to learn more about how the novel and film diverge—with commentary from Ishiguro himself.

A Robot Who Finds Religion

Ishiguro’s first-person narrative takes place inside the mind of Klara, a keenly observant Artificial Friend, or AF—a robot companion designed for socially isolated teens. In Ishiguro’s dystopia, many children are “lifted,” meaning their genes have been edited for superior traits (though cruelty and selfishness remain). They receive remote learning from experts instead of attending school. This prepares them for the universities that, with one exception, accept only lifted students. Klara serves as a beguiling guide to this dark world. As Ishiguro puts it, “Klara’s story is a kind of expedited version of a typical human life. We see her going from virtually a baby to an elderly person…. It’s kind of a distorted mirror.”

Klara appears programmed to lack most negative emotions: She never demonstrates cruelty, jealousy, or anger, though she does seem to experience love, fear (for the well-being of others), gratitude, and happiness. Her perspective—consistently serene and largely without self-interest—lends the novel a restrained and gently contemplative tone. Klara sees people more clearly because her view isn’t filtered through aggression or egotism. But even if it makes her more capable of love, that limitation also makes her less human. Ishiguro says the novel interrogates what we mean when we talk about love: “We tend to put a rather loose term on a whole bunch of emotions, and call it love, as though nothing needs to be said after that about this rather mystical thing.”

In the film, though, viewers don’t have access to Klara’s endlessly curious interiority or the philosophical questions it raises. Instead, Ortega’s Klara conveys the broad, plucky winsomeness of a YA heroine. Eager to please and endowed with the clumsiness of a toddler lacking spatial awareness, she pratfalls her way through the film’s early scenes, tumbling off the store’s window display and later slithering down Josie’s stairs. Those visual gags feel like an odd fit for the material; Ishiguro is known more for low-grade existential sadness than slapstick. That’s not to say his novel lacks whimsy—but it’s subtle and mostly driven by solar-powered Klara making earnest appeals to the sun.

Josie and Her Mom

Waititi’s film also changes a key element of the novel’s plot, drastically lowering the stakes. In Ishiguro’s novel, parents must decide when their children are young whether to put them through the gene-editing operation that makes them “lifted.” The procedure is dangerous; it can lead to debilitating sickness or even death. Klara learns Josie’s older sister, Sal, was lifted, got sick, then died. Yet even in the aftermath of her terrible grief, Josie’s mother, Chrissie, doubles down and chooses to put Josie through the operation as well. Josie also gets sick, and Klara is presumably purchased as her AF to help care for Josie.

The novel forces readers to wrestle with the uncomfortable fact that Chrissie would rather have two dead children than one who isn’t part of the dominant class. One could read it as an allegory for the current debate over how parents should educate their kids. Yet the novel doesn’t portray Chrissie as a monster, but as a regular mom facing monstrous choices. Ishiguro tells me he’s asking us to confront the nature of love: “Is the mother showing love towards her daughter, or is it something else?” he asks.

Amy Adams’s Chrissie is more sympathetic and less interesting. For one, she’s artsy—an interior designer with a tastefully bohemian home. (In the book’s vaguely outlined bureaucratic world, Chrissie holds some nebulous “high-ranking” position.) Most crucially, she doesn’t make the tortured choice to have Josie gene-edited in the wake of Sal dying from the same procedure—because, in the film, Sal has died of natural causes. That convenient revision shields Adams’s character from the critique of being so status-obsessed that she knowingly risks harming her child. Instead of gambling with her kid’s life, Adams’s Chrissie reveals her steeliness when she attempts to drown Klara, which doesn’t happen in the book. While a shot of Klara vomiting large quantities of water might get an easy laugh, it’s a switch that makes Chrissie much less provocative.

And it’s not just Chrissie who gets a Hollywood flattening. Newcomer Mia Tharia’s Josie is a sickly genius who’s invariably kind to Klara and precociously self-aware in the vein of YA teen heroes everywhere. In Ishiguro’s novel, she’s often kind—but also cruel, dismissive, selfish, insecure, and in denial. The novel’s Josie seems to have an inkling that her mother plans to replace her with a robot in the event of her death, but she never allows herself to fully grapple with that painful truth. In Waititi’s telling, Josie has figured out her mother’s plan. The two of them work through their resentments, with Adams’s character telling her daughter, “I was never trying to replace you; I just didn’t want to lose you.” Which is not only cloying, but confusing: She definitely was trying to replace her!

Josie’s Dad and Rick

What we know about the contours of the film’s dystopia we mostly learn from Natasha Lyonne’s Store Manager, who regales her robots with bedtime stories about a pre-WWIII world where something called the internet existed before it got taken away. (There are humanoid androids in this world, but no internet?) But in the novel, we’re drip-fed other information about Ishiguro’s universe. For instance, Josie’s father, Paul (absent from the film), was a brilliant engineer who now lives off the grid in a “community” with other ex-white-collar workers, where they fashion weapons to defend themselves in tribal conflicts. He’s something of a doomsday prepper, but he credibly tells Josie that he’s living more authentically now than in his old life.

If Chrissie represents someone who opts into the ruling system, Paul’s character shows that there are choices even within this world’s oppressive parameters. The book doesn’t weigh in on which path is better; either includes decent people complicit in evil systems. “Most of us lack perspective,” says Ishiguro. “There’s something tragic about it…. Decent people trying really hard to contribute, yet because of this lack of perspective, they might be contributing to something bad.”

The other character in the novel who represents an alternative way of life is Rick, Josie’s best friend and love interest who isn’t “lifted.” Aran Murphy’s Rick gets short shrift in the film, but in the novel, he’s Ishiguro’s most decent (human) character: someone who plays the hand he’s dealt gracefully, teaching himself robotics and caring for his sick mother and Josie. He and Josie formed a “plan” when they were children to spend their lives together, though one senses Josie only holds onto it to keep her despair over her illness at bay. And once she miraculously recovers from her illness, both Klara and Rick fade to the background as she prepares for college. Meanwhile, Rick makes new friends, presumably with other non-lifted kids. Their separation doesn’t feel like Romeo and Juliet so much as the normal, bittersweet way of things: a youthful attachment that gradually dissolves as both kids find their footing in their respective social classes. In Waititi’s film, Rick isn’t given a future outside of Josie; he literally disappears from the film once she recovers.