Variety tears apart Taika Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' as 'catastrophic android fantasy'

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Variety tears apart Taika Waititi's 'Klara and the Sun' as 'catastrophic android fantasy'.

Variety tears apart Taika Waititi's "Klara and the Sun" as "catastrophic android fantasy".

Taika Waititi's film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Klara and the Sun" has received a devastating review from the US trade magazine Variety. The reviewer virtually takes the film apart in the headline: "There's No Life — Intelligent, Artificial or Otherwise" reigns in this "Calamitous Android Fantasy" — meaning no life, neither real nor artificial, in a catastrophic android fantasy.

The source material is considered literarily ambitious: Ishiguro's 2021 novel is told from the perspective of Klara, an artificial companion — an "Artificial Friend," built for a sick girl. At its center are questions about consciousness, empathy, and what artificial devotion can truly accomplish. Variety describes the novel in the teaser as "solemnly complex, questioning" — a serious, multilayered text of probing questions.

Where Waititi goes wrong, according to Variety

Instead of translating this complexity, Waititi has transformed the material into a "cockeyed child's-eye comedy" — a quirky comedy from a child's-eye perspective, as the trade publication writes. This approach worked for the director "once before," it says — referring to "Jojo Rabbit" (2019). That film, a "crass, mawkish 'anti-hate satire'" about the personal and political awakening of a Hitler Youth boy, earned Waititi an Oscar and brought in nearly $100 million at the box office — "in spite of its manifold artistic and …" flaws, as the reviewer hints.

Applying precisely this tone to Ishiguro's android story is judged by Variety as a misstep. The accusation of lifelessness weighs particularly heavy in a film centered on an artificial being — and in which the question of artificial life is the actual subject.

What you can take from the review

A single scathing review is not yet a verdict on a film — especially not for an adaptation of a literarily ambitious work, which is likely to polarize anyway. What remains: Variety sees in "Klara and the Sun" neither the philosophical weight of Ishiguro's novel nor the energy that Waititi inscribed in his earlier films. How the rest of the press and the audience will judge it remains to be seen.