What you need to know...
Her faith runs on sunlight.
Best known for the anarchic comedy of Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi turns markedly more solemn for Klara and the Sun, his adaptation, co-written with Dahvi Waller, of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker shortlisted novel, arriving at Everyman on 23 October 2026.
Set in a near future where genetic engineering has split children into the "lifted" and everyone else, the film follows Klara (Jenna Ortega), an Artificial Friend, a solar powered companion android, bought to keep Josie (Mia Tharia), a sharp but seriously ill teenager, from being alone. Klara studies the world with an outsider's patient curiosity, storing away every small human gesture, and her private, near-religious conviction that the sun itself holds the power to heal Josie gives the story its strange, tender pulse.
Amy Adams plays Chrissie, Josie's careworn mother, quietly carrying grief and guilt of her own, while Aran Murphy is Rick, the childhood friend caught somewhere between Josie's illness and Klara's constant presence. Natasha Lyonne turns up as a watchful store manager and Rachel House as Melania, the family's housekeeper, with Steve Buscemi rounding out the cast. Shot largely around Auckland, with an early sequence filmed in the South Island, the film has composer Michael Giacchino, back after scoring Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit and Next Goal Wins, swapping his usual bombast for something closer to a lullaby.
Expect a film that asks its questions softly: what does devotion look like when it isn't chosen, and can something built to love ever really be loved back. This is Waititi at his stillest, trusting Ishiguro's melancholy to do the heavy lifting rather than reaching for a single joke.
Did you know?
Waititi has admitted that his first instinct was to make it a typically irreverent Taika film full of broad robot comedy, before realising that undercut everything Ishiguro's story was doing. He has since called Klara and the Sun the most dramatic film he has made, a striking departure from the humour of his Marvel and Jojo Rabbit work, and one he found strangely liberating to write without his usual jokes to fall back on.
See this if you liked...
Never Let Me Go (2010), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014)