Here Comes the Klun (CREDIT: Sony Pictures)
Starring: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Aran Murphy, Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi, Rachel House
Director: Taika Waititi
Running Time: 116 Minutes
Rating: PG-13 for Odd Deployments of Violence and Mild Profanity
Release Date: October 23, 2026 (Theaters)
What’s It About?: Klara and the Sun drops us into a bright but beguiling dystopian future where the Internet is no more but artificial intelligence is still very much a thing, particularly in the form of companion androids known as Artificial Friends. Klara (Jenna Ortega) is an obsolete model, and pretty quirky even among this group of misfits. Her Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne) and her fellow AFs think her chances of being adopted are hopeless. But then a lonely, terminally ill girl named Josie (Mia Tharia) sees in Klara the ideal companion. Alas, Josie’s mother Chrissie (Amy Adams) and their housekeeper Melania (Rachel House) are much more skeptical, and Klara doesn’t really understand the nuances of human interaction all that well anyway. But it turns out that Chrissie has her own hidden motivations for allowing Josie to select an AF in the first place, and Klara may just fit into those plans a lot more than initially expected.
What Made an Impression?: Too Artificial, or Not Artificial Enough: Klara and the Sun is based on a Kazuo Ishiguro novel published in 2021, but its conception of AI is from a generation ago. To be fair, Ishiguro couldn’t have known the massive leaps that large language models and their ilk would make in the past few years. But the people adapting this story for the big screen knew about the present day. Now, I don’t mean to imply that they should have molded to be more reflective of reality. But the fact that they didn’t do so means that the final product is rather quaint, in ways that are both obsolete and slightly charming. Most of us aren’t wishing that our AIs would be more human nowadays, but didn’t it feel better when at least some of us felt that way?
Unspooling the Infrastructure: Perhaps the reason why Klara and the Sun fails so mightily to grapple with the current moment is because it’s not trying to grapple with the current moment. After all, Klara is from a generation of AFs that were abandoned because they were too human. Accordingly, this movie is at its most affecting when it examines whether or not synthetic humanity can ever match the natural version. It struggles in that regard as well, because Ortega plays Klara as a bundle of quirks rather than displaying anything recognizably machine-like along with her theoretical soulfulness. So I suppose that this movie’s fundamental problem is that it also is too human, but in a way that it doesn’t let us see its truest self, except only in flashes.
Just Passing Along: Ultimately, this is one of those films that seems competent at presenting a fully realized vision, but there’s something missing at the core. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but on the other hand, I don’t feel any passion being stirred, and I can’t quite pinpoint why. Sure, I explained some issues I had in the preceding paragraphs, but none of those are prohibitively fatal flaws. KatS happened, I’m not mad, and there were even some ideas presented that I might continue to think about. It wasn’t a waste, but most movies are aiming higher than “not a waste.”
Klara and the Sun is Recommended If You Like: Bizarrely oversized clothes, Dialogue that has the cadence of jokiness, Wheat
Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Barns
