AI meets YA head-on in the curiously flat comedy-drama Klara and the Sun, which almost perfectly illustrates how ill-prepared we are for the technological revolution that’s coming to us. In theory, Taiki Waititi should be a snug-as-a-bug fit for Kazuo Ishiguru’s dystopian — or is it? — 2021 novel, given the director’s affinity for a very particular and peculiar kind of reality-based cringe comedy, but Klara just doesn’t deliver on any of the fronts it promises. Instead, we’re faced with a sporadically funny meditation on life and premature death that, like Mark Romanek’s gloomy attempt at Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, can’t quite capture the subtleties of speculative literary sci-fi.
If you hated Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, and the chances are inordinately high that you did, Klara and the Sun is pretty much that same film but in the future. But, contested as it is, Jojo Rabbit — like all of Waititi’s films — came from a good place, and what we have to determine now is whether he has drifted far off course or we have. What used to be so endearing, so naïve, and so vulnerable, just doesn’t work in this film, and the liminal space between films for kids and films for young-at-heart adults that he used to explore so incredibly well in his work — no better than in 2016’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople — now feels like an awkward no-man’s land between two very incompatible stories.
At least it starts with a spring in its step. Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a lonely pup in a robot shop, praying to the sun in the hope that she will be taken home by a passing punter (“Please let today be my day! Let me be chosen!”). Klara is a B1 robot on sale at The Friend Store, which is facing stiff competition from Fancy Friends over the road, where newer Bluetooth-active B3 models are taking over from the recently disgraced B2 models (“Is this the model that killed those people?” asks Klara’s potential buyer).
The Friend Store is a candy-colored prelude to what’s about to happen, with the wonderful Natasha Lyonne as The Store Manager, a den mother who loves her stock more than the outside world seems to. It’s hard to tell what year it is, but it’s clear that this is a future in which A.I. is evolving fast. But at the same time this is a future going backwards; The Store Manager talks wistfully about the internet, which was apparently taken away from everyone after the last world war (“You guys would have loved it”).
While posing artfully in the store’s shop window, Klara catches the eye of Josie (Mia Tharia), who persuades her mother Chrissie (Amy Adams) to buy her as a companion. The film is rife with theories as to why, in a city where bars have names like Ho Bots, people want artificial companions, and Klara’s immediate circle of friends are open to all options. One wants an owner who is sociable and popular (a jock); another wants someone who is needy and nerdy, with low self-esteem and “who thinks they are fat”.
Klara, though, lucks out with Josie, who, in a bid to raise the already elevated stakes, has been genetically “lifted” by a medical procedure that makes her a polymath. Josie lives in a remote country home with her not-very-attentive mother, but the real reason for Chrissie’s motives in acquiring a robot for her daughter is more than just buying her a friend: Josie is seriously ill. From here, the plot involves Klara finding out just how ill Josie is, and what she can do to save her, a journey that will take a very dark turn indeed.
At which point what’s left of the fun all but evaporates; Ortega is a fantastic cheerleader for the promised spirit of the film but, after she leaves Lyonne and the shop, all that is suddenly behind her; what lies ahead instead is the story of a mother who has already lost a daughter preparing to lose another. The possibilities of artificial life come into play much strongly here, notably with Steve Buscemi as the mysterious benefactor Capaldi, but, honestly, you’d have to be really quite thick not to see what’s coming.
Which is the problem throughout; everything about Klara and the Sun is face-palmingly obvious, particularly an excruciating scene in which Josie meets her new schoolmates, who listen to unlistenable avant-garde music, wear unwearable fashion-forward clothes and — are you ready for this? — lisp, as if the clothes and the music weren’t enough. It’s a weird moment that undermines everything the film has set in motion; for all its naivety, there’s a real push and pull here about the film’s intentions, and it isn’t a comfortable experience. The recent BBC series Ann Droid covered most of these ideas quite majestically, in an adult way that was also endearingly silly. Similarly, on paper, Klara and the Sun is a great idea, a way for adults to explain mortality to their kids while bracing themselves for redundancy. It’s just a shame that film didn’t get made.