Critics Savage Taika Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' After London Premiere

The reviews are in, and they're not kind. Taika Waititi's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Klara and the Sun" had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15, and the critical reception was, to borrow a word from the kinder notices, bracing.

According to World of Reel, which aggregated the opening wave of notices, the film scored a 23 on Metacritic after its premiere, and not a single major outlet stepped up to defend it. The Guardian, the Times, and the Telegraph each awarded one star, making it, per Tech Times, the lowest-scoring major literary adaptation at the festival in recent years.

The novel, Ishiguro's 2021 Booker Prize-winner, is told entirely from the point of view of Klara, an AI-powered android sold as a companion for children. It's a book that earns its feeling through extreme restraint -- a first-person narrator who can only understand what she directly observes, and whose gaps in understanding become the reader's window into something devastating. Adapting it is genuinely hard. The obvious trap is exactly the one critics say Waititi fell into.

As Screen Daily's review put it, Waititi produced and directed a film with "strong performances and imaginative visuals" but lost something essential "by widening the story beyond Klara's tight perspective." Tech Times put it more pointedly, reporting that all six critics who reviewed the film described the same failure in nearly identical language: Waititi traded Ishiguro's precisely constructed thought experiment for emotional accessibility, and lost the intellectual argument in the process.

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, and even the worst notices seem to leave her largely alone. Screen Daily noted that "many should warm to Jenna Ortega's endearing performance," and the cast around her -- Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi, Natasha Lyonne -- is the kind of assembly that doesn't come cheap or easy. The screenplay was written by Waititi and Dahvi Waller. The production had more than two years between the wrap of photography and this premiere, which, in retrospect, may not have been enough time to solve the fundamental structural problem.

For readers who loved the book, none of this will be entirely shocking. "Klara and the Sun" is a novel that insists on its own form. Strip away Klara's constrained perspective and you don't have a leaner version of the same story -- you have a different story, one that happens to share the character names. That's a risk Waititi's films have always run: his sensibility is warm, eccentric, and maximalist, which is genuinely wonderful when it fits the material ("Jojo Rabbit," "Hunt for the Wilderpeople") and a genuine mismatch when it doesn't.

The film opens in the United States and United Kingdom on October 23, per Sony Pictures. Waititi's career has had a turbulent few years -- "Thor: Love and Thunder" was badly received, and the long-gestating "Next Goal Wins" underperformed -- so a film this expensive and this high-profile landing at a 23 is going to generate conversations about what comes next for him.

For now, readers who were quietly skeptical the moment this adaptation was announced get to feel however they feel about that. And everyone else has until October 23 to decide whether a disastrous critical consensus is reason to stay home or reason to see for themselves.

Sources cited:
- Screen Daily (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/klara-and-the-sun-review-jenna-ortega-stars-in-taika-waititis-overstuffed-adaptation-of-the-kazuo-ishiguro-novel/5221529.article)
- World of Reel (https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2026/10/15/taika-waititis-klara-and-the-sun-panned-by-critics-gets-1-star-reviews-at-london-premiere)
- Tech Times (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/329164/20261016/klara-sun-scores-metacritic-23-bfi-first-fly-brain-emulation-vindicates-ishiguro.htm)
- LBC (https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/klara-sun-reviews-jenna-ortega-premiere-5Hjdk26_2/)