Sony Pictures has released a new official trailer for Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel.
Jenna Ortega stars as Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to prevent loneliness. She waits in a store, hoping to be chosen by a child, and eventually finds a home with Josie, played by Mia Tharia. Josie is ill, isolated and living in a future where artificial companions are part of everyday life, but Klara’s arrival begins to change the emotional shape of the family around her.
That is the quiet strength of this story. Klara and the Sun may be science fiction, but it does not appear to be chasing the usual AI nightmare: robots turning against humanity, technology collapsing society or machines replacing people in some loud, obvious way. Instead, it asks a more painful question: what happens when something artificial loves with more patience and faith than the humans around it?
Amy Adams plays Josie’s mother, while Natasha Lyonne appears as the store manager, with Steve Buscemi and Aran Murphy also in the cast. The trailer frames Klara not as a cold machine, but as someone — or something — learning the world through observation, devotion and a strange, almost spiritual belief in the sun.
Waititi is an intriguing fit for Ishiguro’s material. His films often balance sadness with warmth, and Klara and the Sun looks like one of his gentler, more dramatic projects. The premise is futuristic, but the emotional conflict is familiar: a family trying to survive grief, a child who needs connection, and an outsider who sees everything with painful clarity.
For fans of thoughtful sci-fi dramas, Klara and the Sun looks like a softer, more intimate kind of AI story. It is less about whether machines can think, and more about whether they can care — and whether humans would even recognise that care if it was offered to them.
Klara and the Sun opens exclusively in movie theaters on October 23, 2026.
Video source: Sony Pictures Entertainment
