Klara and the Sun

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Klara and the Sun is an adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name. In this sci-fi tale, we follow Klara, an artificial friend who is bought and adopted by Josie and her mother. However, when Klara sees a new friend and home that is struggling more than it seems on the surface, she endeavours to help.

I felt quite torn about this film, particularly in the first half. This is a film brimming with dark themes through a light lens, which is so often Waititi's strength. His best feature, Jojo Rabbit, absolutely soared because it balanced this perfectly. From the outset, Klara and the Sun feels like something worth your curiosity merely due to Klara herself. This film has a brilliant lead in Jenna Ortega, and it is absolutely nothing without her at the centre. Klara is this being of pure radiant joy; her own naivety gives her an optimistic lens on the world around her. Things like the sun charge her, give life, and are therefore things she holds love for. Giant cleaning trucks or harvesters that spew smog into the air and blot out the sky draw a fearful reaction from her. Klara is built to find the beauty in life, in the world around her, and that's what she achieves. Her relationship with Josie is one that really challenges her and forces her worldview to become more complex. Yet ultimately, she inspires life and makes a choice that chooses humanity over the machine way of being.

Yet I really struggled with the delivery in this film. The way Klara and the Sun is presented to us felt like being a child having a picture book read aloud to you. It constantly just told you what to know and signposted a lot of the theme messaging. It was a story that didn't trust the viewer to be smart, and so it just gave a very simplistic narrative. I felt Klara and the Sun often held a lot of potential, but it might also have been limited by the very infantile viewpoint of the lead character in that respect. This film also suffers because it is meant to indicate that the nature of what Klara is here to heal is Josie. Yet, there's a point about halfway through the feature where Josie starts disappearing from the story substantially. This really means the film loses itself a lot; it's hard to feel the emotional weight of these connections and what they represent when you're only telling one half of the story. Josie's story also concludes when she rejects an artificial continuation of her life and instead chooses the people around her who love her. An aspect of this is around reconciliation with her Mum, which is a tough pill to swallow if you're actually watching this film. Mia Tharia is absolutely brilliant as Josie, who lives quite an embattled life. Josie's Mum, Chrissy, by contrast, is a pretty poor performance from Amy Adams. This character goes from markedly detached to making extremely problematic decisions around the future of her daughter's life. Watching Adams play against Steve Buscemi, talking about the opportunity of replacing human life, just felt like a low point that did nothing but bring certain characters down. The film kind of points at grief as a theme and says, "see? you understand." But it's actually quite a dark path. There's even an extreme moment of rage from Chrissy when she tries to strangle and drown Klara in a reservoir, and yet we're expected to view her as a redeemed figure by the end of the feature.

As is so often the case with a Waititi film, there is a decent stake in comedy. I really enjoyed the humour centred around Klara; she felt like a strong vehicle to provide a lighter touch to the feature. Some of the other artificial friends (Curnow and Greenwood) often felt like they were overselling their android roles and fishing for laughs. Performers like Rachel House, who regularly overlap with Waititi, are just the sort to really yank you out of a scene. Jesse Griffin, who played the Scarecrow, hits that sweet spot of an unconventional, humorous role with a dash of sadness that you buy into. That is sort of the point here; those characters with a bit of heart clearly shine through. Natasha Lyonne and Aran Murphy both play characters with chips on their respective shoulders about the state of the world but who nurture those they believe in.

I know that Taika Waititi can be capable of some really artistic cinema when he pours himself into it. There are flashes of that here, shots of the sun descending into its 'house', or the first couple of times we see Klara calibrate from her point of view. Even scattered moments in the soundtrack or Giacchino's beautiful, whimsical score awaken beauty in this feature. But a lot of this film is dialogue scenes or interior house shots, and it winds up looking remarkably plain. Watching Waititi go from beautiful exterior sequences to the most drib drab interiors really takes the visual intention of the film down a few notches.

Taika Waititi's mediocre ability as a film director continues. I would give Klara and the Sun a 4.5/10.