Not the Robot Movie You Think It Is
Here is the question at the center of Klara and the Sun: “How will I know if my person and I are a good match?” Jenna Ortega asks it in the trailer with total earnestness. The words land because Klara, an Artificial Friend built to be a child’s companion, means every syllable. Sony Pictures, through TriStar, brings Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel to theaters October 23, 2026, and it might be the most emotionally ambitious mainstream film of the fall.
The setup is simple and devastating. Klara is a solar-powered robot designed to ease the loneliness of the family she lives with. She is chosen by Josie, played by Mia Tharia, a lonely teenager living with a chronic illness. Josie’s mother, played by Academy Award nominee Amy Adams, is cautious from the start. “This one? She looks tired,” she says in the trailer, and you feel the whole history of that family in one line. The film follows what happens when a being built for devotion is placed inside a household that has already suffered great loss, and begins, in her clumsy, wondering way, to heal it.
Waititi’s Boldest Swing
This is the film’s secret weapon: the man directing it. Taika Waititi won an Oscar for Jojo Rabbit, then spent years as Hollywood’s busiest comedy voice, Thor, Time Bandits, a shelf of projects. By his own admission, his first instinct on Klara and the Sun was to fill it with robot jokes. He tried it. It did not work. “Why am I adapting this really amazing book and then trying to break away from it?” he said. So he stopped. He calls this his most dramatic film, and the trailer, all warmth and ache, set against a dystopian world of Artificial Friends sold like dolls, suggests he meant it.
The pedigree behind the camera is serious. Waititi co-wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller, and the producers include David Heyman, the man who shepherded Harry Potter to the screen, alongside Garrett Basch and Waititi himself. Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, serves as an executive producer, a sign the author trusted this adaptation. The supporting cast adds Steve Buscemi, Natasha Lyonne, and Aran Murphy. At CinemaCon in April, TriStar president Nicole Brown framed the film’s heart perfectly: “a hopeful story about friendship and connection at a time when technology makes us feel so alone.” That is not marketing fluff. That is the thesis.
Why Now, Why This Story
Sony released a new featurette this month, “Instant Connection,” where Ortega describes Klara as “earnest, optimistic, clumsy, but incredibly emotionally aware.” Watch thirty seconds of her performance and you believe her. There is something quietly radical about a robot story that is not about the machines taking over, but about what devotion looks like when it comes from something that cannot feel pain and chooses to care anyway. The film is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some violence, and strong language, this is not a kids’ picture with a robot mascot. It is asking grown-up questions about love, replacement, and what makes a person irreplaceable.
Ishiguro’s 2021 novel was shortlisted for nothing and praised by nearly everyone who read it, a story narrated by a machine trying to understand a family the way a child tries to understand thunder. Waititi has compared its emotional effect to After Yang, the beloved 2021 film that critics adored. The difference: Klara and the Sun arrives with a genuine movie star in the lead role. Ortega, who has become one of the most-watched young actors alive, does her best work when playing characters who feel slightly out of step with the world, and who could be more out of step than a robot learning tenderness?
One to Watch With Someone You Love
The fall calendar is crowded, but Klara and the Sun is doing something the other October releases are not: it is betting that audiences will show up for feeling. That is a gamble. It is also the kind of gamble great films are built on. When the lights go down on October 23, expect to leave the theater thinking about the people, and the machines, who have loved you most carefully. In a year when we have watched robots do everything from air taxi test flights to publishing their own bloopers, like this robot that published its bloopers, Klara asks the next question: what happens when the machine is the one who teaches us to be human? For more on what is lighting up screens and stages this season, this guide to the best things to do in NYC this October has you covered.
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