An age when many people are convinced robots will eventually destroy us all probably isn’t the ideal moment for Taika Waititi’s feel-good adaptation of Klara and the Sun, wherein an Artificial Friend ( Jenna Ortega ) helps her grief-stricken owners realize, “It’s okay to be broken.” True, Ishiguro’s 2021 sci-fi novel was prescient in anticipating a loneliness epidemic that would put us under the thrall of machines programmed to approximate human conversation. But Waititi, who wrote and directed the film, forgoes any attempt to capture the book’s existential depth, offering a manic, lighthearted robot romp instead.
Apparently, the awkward marriage between solemn source material and Waititi’s quirky tone was intentional. When Vanity Fair caught up with Ishiguro last week, he described his own book as “bleak.” For the film, however, he wanted something different: He sought out Waititi’s “kind of wacky, bordering on surreal humor.” The Nobel Prize laureate compared this adaptation, which hits theaters October 23, to an artist covering a song and making it their own.
Unfortunately, not all covers are Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” To get a sense of how very different these tunes are, read on to learn more about how the novel and film diverge—with commentary from Ishiguro himself.