Klara and the Sun Review Finds Waititi and Ishiguro at Odds
The review treats the film as a lopsided pairing: Waititi's comic instincts work against an Ishiguro story built on quiet, unspoken feeling, and only Ortega is said to bridge the two.
Reporting from 1 source: Beneath the Tangles.
Beneath the Tangles reviews Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi's film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend bought by Josie (Mia Tharia) against the doubts of her mother Chrissie (Amy Adams). The review says the bright, artificial look and Waititi's humor often miss, while Ortega's physical performance holds. It calls Ishiguro and Waititi mismatched storytellers.
The review singles out the household as the place the film's tone fights itself. Chrissie and the family housekeeper, played by Rachel House, are written as comic obstacles, and the review says the characters sometimes act to set up a joke rather than to serve the story. Ortega gets the opposite treatment: the review describes her crawling, hopping, and skipping in stretchy, awkward motions, and argues that the physical comedy is what keeps the film watchable as it goes on.
The reviewer names a specific influence on the look, a bright, deliberately artificial world that reads as 1960s inspired, and calls the approach interesting but unnecessary to the story.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Beneath the Tangles Beneath the Tangles