3 Minutes
A fragile, sunlit robot stares into the frame. It feels like a photograph and a question at once: what does it mean to be chosen? Vanity Fair has just released the first images from Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s bold screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s celebrated novel.
Sony has set the theatrical release for October 23, 2026, and the cast is as intriguing as the premise: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne bring Ishiguro’s world to life under Waititi’s eye. The story centers on an Artificial Friend who watches people closely, catalogues their habits and waits—patient and observant—for a family to pick her. It’s intimate. It’s eerie. It asks quiet questions about longing and belonging.
Dahvi Waller, known for creating Mrs. America, penned the initial draft. Waititi then stepped in, reworking parts of the script—maybe most of it. He told Vanity Fair that this film pushed him toward a different register. He tried to stamp it with his usual comic fingerprints at first. It didn’t hold. So he let the novel breathe through the screenplay, and the result, he says, might be one of his most dramatic films yet.
What does that sound like on screen? Expect flashes of humor, sure, but anchored by quieter, more melancholic moments. Think of Waititi sharpening his comedic instincts into something less garish and more human. The images hint at that shift: soft light, patient framing, performances that seem to listen as much as they speak.
Waititi arrives at this project after a rocky few years. Thor: Love & Thunder failed to land for many viewers in 2022, Next Goal Wins—shot back in 2019—hit theaters in 2023 to mixed reaction, and his Apple TV+ reboot of Time Bandits was canceled after one season. Yet the director keeps moving. He’s lined up Barn 8 for the big screen, has long-rumored attachments to a Star Wars film and a live-action Flash Gordon, and still has projects titled The Incal and James that remain shrouded in development silence.
The first frames of Klara and the Sun suggest a Taika Waititi willing to let silence speak and tenderness complicate the comic beats he’s known for. For fans of the novel and cinephiles curious about a new side of Waititi, these are images to study closely. More will follow as the October release approaches—so keep watching the light.
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