The first trailer for Klara and the Sun is here, and it tells you immediately what Taika Waititi understood about this book. This is not a sci-fi story. It is a love story about a machine learning what love actually costs.
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to companion a sick girl through isolation. If you are imagining something cold and robotic, that is not what Ortega is doing here. The trailer shows her moving through domestic spaces that feel warm and fragile at the same time, rooms full of soft light and the quiet anxiety of a household trying to hold itself together. Klara observes everything. She processes everything. And Ortega plays that observation with a stillness that makes you forget you are watching a person pretend to be a machine.
Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the novel. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is worth mentioning not as a credential flex but because it tells you something about the level of writing this film is adapting. Ishiguro does not write plots. He writes emotional architectures. The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun. Each one is about a character who serves others while slowly realizing what they have given up in the process. Waititi picking this material is the most interesting choice he has made since Jojo Rabbit, because it requires him to do something he has not done on screen in years: be restrained.
Waititi built his reputation on irreverence. What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. All of them run on charm and comic energy and the feeling that nobody is taking anything too seriously. Klara and the Sun asks him to take everything seriously. The trailer suggests he is up to it. There are no jokes in the footage. No winks. Just a machine looking at the sun and trying to understand why it makes her feel something she was not programmed to feel.
If you have not read the book, do it before October. It is short, maybe two hundred pages, and it will stay with you for weeks. Ishiguro writes with a simplicity that hides enormous emotional complexity underneath. Every sentence sounds plain until you realize what it actually means.
This could be the fall movie nobody saw coming. Waititi, Ortega, and a Nobel Prize-winning source novel about what it means to love someone you were built to serve. I am paying close attention.
No comments yet