A Cast That Promises Everything, a Score That Warns You Off
Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun arrives carrying the kind of cultural weight that should, by most measures, guarantee a serious run at audiences. It’s adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel – the same author whose devastatingly restrained storytelling has made him one of literature’s most decorated voices – and it stars Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams in a dystopian world where genetic engineering determines social class and an outdated android named Klara ends up befriending a sick teenager named Josie, played by Mia Tharia. It has grief, class anxiety, technology as existential threat. And yet, as of publication, the film sits at a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That number is hard to ignore. It’s also, depending on how you consume criticism, either a flashing red warning or a reason to get curious. ThirdFloor entertainment writers Lachlan Guertin and Rachel Choy went in with that score already burned into their heads – and came out with genuinely split reactions that say as much about what the film is trying to do as what it fails to deliver.
What They Were Expecting Going In
Rachel Choy came in primed for emotional damage. Ishiguro writes devastating books – that’s not a criticism, it’s practically his brand – and she expected the film to do the same kind of work on her. The anticipation was for something that would hollow her out by the credits.
Lachlan Guertin’s entry point was different. He knew the book had been popular enough that it nearly made their book club list, and his investment in Amy Adams runs deep – she’s among his favorite working actresses. But he also walked in knowing about the 27%, which for him typically functions less as a deterrent and more as an intriguing data point. He tends to find value in films that critics dismiss, particularly when they feature female leads and a literary source. That combination – two women at the center, a beloved book underneath – is usually enough to pull him in regardless of what the aggregate score says.
Where the Film Actually Lands
Guertin enjoyed the first half. That’s worth noting, because it suggests Klara and the Sun isn’t a failure of concept – it’s a failure of endurance. Something in the second half loses the thread, and he left the theater with a specific, telling thought: “I think that would have been a really good book.” That’s one of the more damning things you can say about a literary adaptation. It’s not an accusation of badness so much as a suggestion that the story’s power was always native to the page, and the translation process bled something out of it.
Choy, expecting her heart to be ripped out, found herself recalibrating those expectations against what was actually on screen. The themes are all present – grief corroding a mother’s judgment, the class violence baked into genetic “advancement,” the particular loneliness of an artificial being trying to understand human attachment. The bones of an emotionally brutal story are there. Whether the film puts enough meat on those bones is where the two writers diverge.
There’s a defensible read on why critics panned it so hard. Choy raised this herself: sometimes a low Rotten Tomatoes score reflects a critic base that arrives with rigid expectations and punishes a film for not being the version they wanted. A movie that leans into entertainment value over prestige-drama gravity can get dinged for not being serious enough, even when what it’s doing has merit. She went in willing to give the film that benefit of the doubt. The question is whether Klara and the Sun earns that generosity or simply needs it.
What complicates the critical picture is the cast. Ortega plays Klara – an android, outdated by the world’s standards, navigating human relationships she’s technically equipped for but emotionally unqualified to fully decode. That’s the kind of role that can anchor a film or sink it depending on how a director frames the character’s interiority. Adams, whose screen presence has carried far more troubled productions than this, brings whatever the material gives her. Neither performance appears to be the problem the critics identified. The 27% is pointing at something structural, not something in the acting.
The Adaptation Problem
Ishiguro’s novels work through omission. What his characters don’t say, what they don’t fully understand about their own situations, is where his real meaning lives. Never Let Me Go – his closest thematic ancestor to Klara and the Sun – built its devastation through what the reader gradually realizes the characters will never realize about themselves. That kind of quiet, accumulating horror is extraordinarily difficult to replicate visually. Film wants to show; Ishiguro builds power through what remains unseen and unsaid.
Waititi is not a director known for restraint. His sensibility runs toward energy, color, and an irreverence that has served him well in projects built around those qualities. Whether that instinct is compatible with Ishiguro’s particular brand of slow-burning, elliptical grief is the central tension underneath everything the critics flagged.
Should You Actually See It?
If you’re coming in as an Amy Adams completionist or someone who wants to watch Jenna Ortega work through a genuinely unusual role, there is something in Klara and the Sun worth your time – at least for the first half. The world it builds, with genetic engineering as a tool of class stratification and an android as the story’s moral center, is conceptually interesting enough to hold attention before the back half starts to drift. Guertin’s experience bears that out.
If you need a film to fully deliver on its emotional promise, to earn the devastation that Ishiguro’s source material is capable of producing, the 27% is probably telling you something true. The gap between what this story could do and what the film actually does is wide enough that it’s hard to leave the theater without doing the math on it.
Choy went in ready to defend the film against what she assumed was critic snobbery. Guertin went in ready to enjoy something critics had dismissed. Both of them came out thinking about the book – which is either the best or worst possible advertisement for a literary adaptation, depending on whether you’ve already read it.
