Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' Premieres at London Film Festival to Mixed Reviews

The book-to-film pipeline has delivered a lot of misfires in the AI-anxiety era, and the early word on Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun suggests it lands somewhere in the complicated middle: not a disaster, not a triumph, and very much worth arguing about before it opens wide.

The film had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15, and according to a review filed by Flickering Myth out of the festival, it's Jenna Ortega who holds the thing together. She plays Klara, what Ishiguro's 2021 novel calls an "Artificial Friend," a solar-powered robot designed to ease the loneliness of teenagers. Flickering Myth called hers "an inquisitive living-doll performance that immediately earns your empathy, even if what's going on around her can often leave you unmoved."

That qualifier is doing a lot of work. Waititi, who wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller, is a filmmaker who excels when eccentricity and warmth are given room to breathe. Flickering Myth noted that he "excels when directing an ensemble in an off-kilter tale," and this adaptation did seem like a natural fit on paper. Ishiguro's novel is quiet, interior, devastatingly sad in ways that sneak up on you. It won him no prizes on top of the Nobel he already had, but it sold well and it stuck with readers. Getting that onto a screen without flattening it is genuinely hard.

Deadline's review out of London was less charitable. According to coverage published by Deadline, the film is "a curiously flat dystopian comedy-drama" that illustrates how the material resists easy cinematic translation. The review's most stinging line: "It's just a shame that film didn't get made" -- a sentence that lands like a door closing quietly.

What nobody disputes is the cast. Sony 3000 Pictures and Spyglass Media assembled real talent here. Amy Adams plays the matriarch with secrets. Natasha Lyonne appears as a store manager. Steve Buscemi shows up. Aran Murphy, son of Cillian Murphy, has a supporting role. According to a report in Reuters filed from London on October 15, the film puts a robot at the center of a story about what it means to be human -- which is the pitch, and also the challenge.

For anyone who read the novel: Ishiguro is an executive producer on this, which either reassures you or makes you nervous, depending on your feelings about authors who get too close to their own adaptations.

The book angle here is worth sitting with separately. Ishiguro's Klara was already a BookTok staple before this film was announced, the kind of quiet literary novel that finds its audience in waves rather than all at once. A wide Sony release on October 23 -- with a PG-13 rating, per Sony's own materials, for "thematic elements, some violence and strong language" -- is going to introduce it to a lot of people who never cracked the spine. That's not a bad outcome for a Nobel laureate's backlist.

Waiiti's direction gets described, in the Flickering Myth piece, as "relatively restrained" -- praise that, in his case, is also a mild warning. The film apparently looks beautiful, its farmstead setting evoking something almost Wizard of Oz-like. Whether restraint is the right mode for a filmmaker who built his reputation on controlled chaos is the question reviewers keep circling.

Ortega, for her part, is having a stretch where she can do almost no wrong commercially. After this, she's set to appear alongside Natalie Portman in The Gallerist and then in J.J. Abrams' The Great Beyond, according to Collider. This is a star who's picking ambitious material and mostly pulling it off. If Klara and the Sun underperforms, it won't be on her.

Sources cited:
- Flickering Myth (BFI London Film Festival Review) (https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2026-bfi-london-film-festival-review-klara-and-the-sun/)
- Deadline (https://deadline.com/2026/10/klara-and-the-sun-review-taiki-waititi-jenna-ortega-amy-adams-1237158580/)
- Reuters / KELO (https://kelo.com/2026/10/15/jenna-ortega-plays-an-artificial-friend-in-need-in-klara-and-the-sun/)
- Collider (https://collider.com/jenna-ortega-klara-and-the-sun-release-date-october-2026/)
- Deadline (trailer/cast) (https://deadline.com/2026/06/klara-and-the-sun-trailer-jenna-ortega-amy-adams-1236964146/)