Klara and the Sun

Check out my full review @ https://movieswetextedabout.com/klara-and-the-sun-movie-review-jenna-ortega-carries-taika-waititis-gentle-heartfelt-drama/ Rating: B- KLARA AND THE SUN is a warm, gentle drama that I quite enjoyed. Jenna Ortega carries it with one of my favorite performances of hers: expressive, funny, and much more complete than she’ll get credit for. Taika Waititi keeps his humor under control, and those light, kindly comedic bits suit Kazuo Ishiguro’s story. The isolated farm, the sunlight, and Klara’s pixelated point of view give it an imaginative, almost fantasy-like feel, and Michael Giacchino’s score is great as always. Its ideas about humanity, faith, and loneliness are interesting, but the film saves most of them for the final act, repeats the same kinds of scenes far too often, and gets more sentimental than it needs to. The ambiguous messaging around AI companions for lonely kids sits uneasily with me, but that said, I felt something by the end, and that’s more than I expected walking in.

"Klara" (Jenny Ortega) is the last in a long line of increasingly redundant personal robots whose hopes of being sold are dwindling by the days that she spends in the window of their shop with her colleagues. Then, out of the blue, she espies "Josie" (Mia Tharia) who is out shopping with her mother (Amy Adams) for that very thing. Shunning the more advanced models, she convinces "Chrissy" to buy her the older version and next thing "Klara" is ensconced in their substantial but remote home. Their housekeeper "Melania" (Rachel House) doesn't exactly trumpet her arrival but once she has recalibrated it soon becomes clear that neither of her two mistresses have their problems to seek and that for "Klara" the sun is going to play an intregral part in not just her charging cycle but it provides her with a substantial amount of her faith, too. What now ensues takes a look at the effects of hope, grief and illness on a family and offers us a glimpse into just what the word humanity actually might mean. Ortega engagingly provides us something of the merry mannequin with her performance of the glass-half-full "Klara" and with some pithy observations from a script that shies not from some fairly serious issues, this uses it's comedy and a degree of empathy to ask some interesting questions about the science of life itself, too. The underused Adams isn't at her best as her role isn't really that well developed and I'd have liked to have seen a bit more from the curmudgeonly housekeeper, but there's still plenty here to enjoy and provoke thought in equal measure and with the growing culture of AI replacing so many human functions, this goes some way to posing that ultimate question about our own collective futures.