Klara and the Sun is a warmly lit movie with decent performances, dealing with the all-important topic of our humanity in a time of AI, yet it left me feeling a whole lot of nothing.
Klara (Jenna Ortega) is an Artificial Friend, or AF, a robot created for the sole purpose of being the companion teenagers need during the awkwardest phase of their lives. She is from an older generation of bots, so she languishes in a store, getting up to hijinks in a display window with other robots, hoping a passerby chooses her like a Victoria orphan.
Even among weird robots, Klara is a whole other level of kooky, possibly because there is something off with her build. We know that because she often stands on one leg, flamingo-style. If she wasn’t a robot, it would be easy to read her as neurodivergent.
As a solar-powered robot, Klara worships the sun. She is convinced it can grant wishes. Those early scenes in the shop are funny and do a lot of world-building with very little. Natasha Lyonne delivers an entertaining performance as “store manager”, a human reduced to her most basic capitalist function in a way that is never explained enough.
At the first act break, Klara gets chosen by Josie (Mia Tharia), a teenage girl who immediately sees in her a mirror of her own quirkiness and difference.
Josie is grieving the death of her sister, and a life before loss. In the aftermath of the tragedy, her father left and her mother (Amy Adams) buried herself in work. Josie is sick in a way you immediately know is bad news, even if, like me, you didn't read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel.
Josie has been “lifted”, i.e she underwent a procedure to make her a genius (Somewhere in the movie, there is a theme of robots becoming humans and humans becoming robots, but like most of the other themes, this is underexplored). In a slightly absurd scene, other lifted kids demonstrate a whole lot of ego and wankiness and zero empathy. Something in their vibe and mock avant-garde style feels like an Otto Dix, Weimar Republic painting come to life.
Overall, the set and styling decisions are the most interesting aspects of the movie – it feels both nostalgic and sci-fi-y. The cars are self-driven, but they look like 70s models. Shots of vinyl records mark transitions between scenes.
Fresh out of the box, Klara wears a grey, institutional uniform that both male and female robots wear. As her friendship with Josie develops, she starts borrowing her clothes, and we get something akin to the makeover montage compulsory of any YA movie. At times, Josie wears bits of Klara's uniform too – including the full outfit while she wistfully watches her mother laughing at Klara impersonating her daughter.
And there, we have the crux of the film: a grieving mother, wracked with guilt for forcing her daughter through the deadly lifting procedure, trying to replace her with a robot.
This is a theme that, as our jobs are under threat from AI and tech bros argue that AI can have a soul, should particularly resonate. And maybe, if that movie had come out 10 years earlier, when these topics weren't something we grapple with every day, it would have. Maybe that’s why the movie doesn’t land: it’s too contemporary to work as a dystopian warning, and too out of touch with real AI to work as commentary.
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