Taika Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' Opens to Brutal Reviews Ahead of Oct. 23 Release

There's a version of Klara and the Sun that works. Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel about a solar-powered Artificial Friend who watches over a sick child is quiet, patient, devastating in the way only Ishiguro can be devastating, which is to say you don't feel it hit you until you're already on the floor. That version, apparently, is not the one Sony Pictures is releasing on October 23.

The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15 and the reviews that landed this week are rough. Variety, reviewing the film at the festival, called Taika Waititi's decision to play the adaptation for comedy "ruinous," describing it as a "misbegotten" take on the source material. Metacritic currently has the film sitting at a 27, based on eight critics reviews, with zero positive notices logged, half mixed, half outright negative.

That score stings more because of the pedigree involved. Ishiguro is a Nobel laureate, and according to coverage by Yahoo Entertainment, the 71-year-old author serves as an executive producer on the film. The screenplay, co-written by Waititi and Dahvi Waller, whose credits include Mad Men and Mrs. America, carries real talent on its face. The cast, led by Jenna Ortega as Klara, Amy Adams as Josie's mother, with Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne in supporting roles, is exactly the kind of assembly that earns a project awards-season heat before a single frame screens publicly.

And yet. Waititi has made genuinely good films on absurdist foundations before, Jojo Rabbit proves he can find grief inside a joke. But Ishiguro's novel operates on a different register entirely. The book is narrated by Klara with a gentle, alien sincerity; it asks the reader to sit inside a non-human consciousness and slowly feel the weight of what humans ask their machines to absorb. Comedy, of the strained whimsical variety Variety describes, is almost the exact wrong instrument for that material.

The setup itself remains intact on screen. As reported by Flicks and Books of Brilliance, the film follows Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to prevent loneliness, whose new owner Josie is battling a mysterious illness. Klara becomes devoted to saving Josie and the family around her. In Ishiguro's hands, this is a story about love, obsolescence, and what it means to be a person. Whether Waititi's version manages any of that under the comedy coating is a question audiences will answer starting October 23, but critics who saw it in London are not encouraging them to rush.

For BookTok, the stakes here are real. Coverage from Storizen noted that production stills and teasers have pushed Ishiguro's novel back to the top of global reading lists, which is how the book-to-screen pipeline often works now: the movie markets the book even when the movie falls short. Readers who love the novel and head into this adaptation hoping for something faithful should probably calibrate accordingly.

Ishiguro's back catalogue has been adapted before, and well. The Remains of the Day still holds. Never Let Me Go, the 2010 Romanek film with Carey Mulligan, got close enough to the novel's emotional devastation that it felt worthy. Klara and the Sun is a harder object to translate, weirder, slower, more interior. Waititi is not a slow, interior director. That mismatch was the risk from day one, and it appears the critics who saw the BFI premiere feel it landed exactly as badly as it threatened to.

Sources cited:
- Variety (https://variety.com/2026/film/news/klara-and-the-sun-review-1236914992/)
- Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/klara-and-the-sun/)
- Wikipedia, Klara and the Sun (film) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun_(film))
- Yahoo Entertainment (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/klara-sun-movie-everything-know-003006506.html)
- Storizen (https://storizen.com/news/klara-and-the-sun-movie-2026-jenna-ortega-amy-adams-release-date/)
- Books of Brilliance (https://booksofbrilliance.com/2026/10/15/klara-and-the-sun-movie/)
- Flicks (https://www.flicks.us/movie/klara-and-the-sun/)