Surely there are a lot of Gen Z people who would love to be friends with Jenna Ortega. She’s very famous and seems to be a cool person. The trailer for Klara and The Sun turns Ortega into a friend, but not in the way you’d imagine. The film features her as a quirky companion robot who is learning about the world through her new owner.
The story is based on a 2021 book by Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro. He also wrote the award-winning Never Let Me Go, which got its own movie in 2010.
Taika Waititi, who worked on Jojo Rabbit, and various Avengers films, will be directing the movie.
Jenna Ortega plays the story’s main character, a childish “artificial friend.” Of course, Ortega starred in Netflix’s popular Wednesday series, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and the Scream franchise. The human by her side is Mia Tharia, whose credits include Phoenix Rise (2023-2024) and September Says. Here’s a synopsis to go with Klara and the Sun‘s trailer:
Klara and the Sun introduces audiences to Klara, an Artificial Friend who wants nothing more than to find the perfect home. When Klara meets Josie, each immediately senses a kindred spirit in the other. Josie has a fraught relationship with her mother, and they’ve suffered great loss, but Klara’s innocent wonder and unwavering loyalty begin to heal the family and bring light to Josie’s complicated world.
The story seems to be uplifting and heartwarming, as robots learn from the humans that care for them, and care for them in return.
“We come out of the lab with the intelligence of a toddler, and then we learn everything from our humans.”
This premise does bring to light a shift in the way robots and artificial intelligence are being portrayed in media. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, movies like Blade Runner, I, Robot, and The Matrix warned of the dangers of a machine-dominated world. But over the last decade, society has seemed to warm up to integrating artificial intelligence into our daily lives. With this, more content has come out as part of a trend of humanizing robots.
Companion (2025), though it was an entirely different genre, personified robots and made the main AI character relatable. Another example is Detroit: Become Human, a 2018 video game following several main AI characters who have developed emotions. Both examples are darker in theme than Klara and the Sun appears to be. However, they all humanize robots and AI and deal with issues of discrimination against and mistreatment of these entities.
This makes for a complicated issue in the modern day, with people delegating everything from research and organization to critical thinking and life advice to ChatGPT. The question I ask is whether, despite the emotional depth and significance of these stories as well as the discrimination issues within human society they allude to, we should be seeing AI in a humanistic light at all. The warnings from robot films of the 1980s-2000s certainly still haunt me. I am interested to see if they address this issue.
Klara and the Sun has no set release date yet, but the trailer claims it is “coming soon.”