The prospect of driving a clown car through a novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro sounds fairly doomed from the start. Yet, to writer-director Taika Waititi’s credit, his Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit (2019) took enough of an iconoclastic stance on its (comparatively far darker) source novel, Christine Leunens’ Caging Skies, to confidently mould itself into a Mel Brooks-approved farce about fascist indoctrination.
Klara and the Sun, unfortunately, is far more faithful to its source book. As a result, it’s both a betrayal of Ishiguro’s quiet, meditative vision and a poor imitation of Waititi’s own, pre-Marvel work, most notably Boy (2010) and the Sam Neill-fronted Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).
