Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun has been received poorly, putting Jenna Ortega’s turn as Klara in a film that is already drawing hard reactions. For a director who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2020 for Jojo Rabbit, the response is a sharp stumble.
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, while Mia Tharia plays Josie. That pairing sits at the center of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, which follows an artificial friend chosen by a lonely 14-year-old named Josie.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel
The source material is built on a controlled, uneasy setup: Josie is the daughter of a privileged single mother in a vaguely located future, and the society around her is sharply divided by parents who genetically modify their children to help them get ahead. In the novel, that process is called being lifted. Klara tries to save Josie by appealing to the sun.
That structure matters because the story depends on restraint. The novel’s delicate existentialism can survive only if the adaptation keeps the tension between Klara’s literal faith and the world’s harder logic.
Waititi’s screen version
The film does not appear to have landed that balance. Josie’s line — “It’s just a burning ball of fire that can’t think or feel.” — cuts directly against Klara’s belief that the sun can heal her, and the film’s own framing turns that conflict into the adaptation’s clearest fault line.
Josie also defines a dream as “anything you want to happen, really bad,” a line that fits the story’s childlike surface but not necessarily the novel’s more fragile emotional math. For a filmmaker associated with naive narrators, as in Jojo Rabbit, that sensibility may have seemed like a fit; here, it risks flattening the material.
Josie, Klara, and the sun
Waititi’s version is being read as a collision between a thoughtful novel and a directorly style that can tip toward whimsy and sentimentality. The result is that the film’s sweetness appears to have swamped the book’s unease, which is usually the part that gives Ishiguro’s work its staying power.
How much of Ishiguro’s original ending or deeper meaning remains in the film is not answered, but the reception already tells the business side of the story: this is a prestige adaptation that is not being rewarded for its pedigree. The project now lives or dies on whether viewers want Ortega’s Klara and Tharia’s Josie to carry a story that the current response says has lost its bite.
