Klara and the Sun review: Aran Murphy is lovely. Otherwise, this film is best forgotten

Klara and the Sun

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Director: Taika Waititi

Cert: 12A

Starring: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Rachel House, Aran Murphy, Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi

Running Time: 1 hr 56 mins

Let’s start with the few positives. Aran Murphy gives a lovely supporting performance in Taika Waititi’s otherwise regrettable adaptation of an admired Kazuo Ishiguro novel. The rising actor’s turn as an eccentric young boffin clarifies that, soon enough, we will no longer feel obliged to note that his parents are Cillian Murphy and Yvonne McGuinness.

What else? The Waititi regular Rachel House raises a few laughs as a terrifying housekeeper. The New Zealand scenery is nice. Help me out. I’m struggling.

We are watching a familiar genre here. Amy Adams stars as Chrissie, a flinty mother in a vaguely postapocalyptic world who, years after her oldest child dies, buys a humanoid robot to keep her surviving daughter, Josie (Mia Tharia), company in the waving wheat fields.

Jenna Ortega deserves our sympathy for heroic efforts to make something appealing of Klara, the titular cyborg, but the irritating feyness of the character will not be resisted. She is forever smiling manically and falling backwards to no comic effect. You have avoided a hundred street performers painted silver doing this act.

The film is treading on ground already covered by films such as AI: Artificial Intelligence, Bicentennial Man and After Yang. In an odd coincidence, Travis Knight’s fine Wildwood, also released this week, features another mother replacing a doomed child with a mechanical one.

Klara and the Sun, alas, features no insights into the potential consolations of a manufactured intelligence, preferring instead to focus on the tedious quirk that has lately become Waititi’s stock-in-trade.

The film is peculiarly uncertain in its world building. Somewhere in the opening 20 minutes, Natasha Lyonne, as the proprietor of the robot store, hurriedly talks us through the planet’s disastrous backstory. Something about the internet. Something about war. Something about what we have lost.

But the film’s Earth – or its New Zealand, anyway – does not seem particularly blasted. City streets are a bit bleak. Technology feels a tad retro. (This Sony film features an old-school Sony monitor.) Everything looks very much as the average 21st-century hipster would like it to look.

Imagine an underdeveloped episode of Black Mirror swathed in candyfloss and stretched out to three times its ideal length. Never as funny as it is annoying, never as touching as it is maudlin, here is a film too misconceived to establish even the most eccentric cult following.

In cinemas from Friday, October 23rd