Klara and the Sun (2026)
Directed by Taika Waititi
No — Klara and the Sun is not especially woke, scoring 28 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing with great emotional force about things that are not quite said.
Consciousness Markers
Jenna Ortega as a prominent Latina lead, Mia Tharia as a British-South Asian co-lead, and Rachel House in a supporting role constitute a meaningfully diverse ensemble. Industry discourse around the casting was considerable, though the film itself does not foreground identity as a thematic concern.
The 'lifting' subplot, in which only wealthy families can afford genetic enhancement for their children, critiques class stratification with some directness. The premise of purchasing an Artificial Friend as a consumer product also carries implicit commodification critique, though both threads are reportedly underexplored.
The narrative is anchored entirely in female relationships: an android caregiver, a sick daughter, and a grieving mother. The emotional and domestic labor falls exclusively on female figures, though this reflects Ishiguro's source structure rather than any imposed ideological agenda.
The film's release amid genuine public anxiety about AI companionship and human obsolescence gives its central allegory a timely, on-the-nose quality. Waititi reportedly softened Ishiguro's more rigorous philosophical interrogation, but the promotional discourse leaned heavily on the AI ethics angle, lending the project a mild sermonizing atmosphere.
Klara's status as a non-human consciousness navigating human social codes gives her an outsider perspective that maps loosely onto neurodivergence-adjacent territory. Josie's post-lifting isolation adds a further layer of social estrangement, though neither is framed through a neurodivergence lens explicitly.
The film's diverse casting generated industry commentary about representation, but race is not a thematic concern within the film's narrative. The score reflects the casting optics rather than any in-film racial consciousness.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subplots are present in the film's content or source material adaptation.
No climate themes, environmental messaging, or ecological anxiety appears anywhere in the film or its promotional discourse.
No body positivity themes are present. Josie's physical fragility from the lifting procedure is a plot element, not a celebration of bodily diversity.
The film is set in a near-future dystopia. There is no engagement with historical revision or recontextualization of past events.
Why it received this score
Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing with great emotional force about things that are not quite said. Taika Waititi won an Oscar for a film in which a Nazi puppet learns about love. The collision of these two sensibilities in Klara and the Sun is, in the technical sense, an event.
The film adapts Ishiguro's 2021 novel about Klara, an Artificial Friend who observes the human world with a solar-powered sincerity that the humans around her cannot quite match. Jenna Ortega plays Klara as something between a department store mannequin and a golden retriever, and this is meant as a compliment to both Ortega and golden retrievers. The film's progressive sensibilities arrive not through argument but through demographic arrangement: a Latina android, a British-South Asian girl, an Indigenous New Zealander director, and a screenplay that distributes its emotional intelligence exclusively among its female characters while the men hover at the margins looking decorative and slightly confused. The "lifting" subplot, in which wealthy parents purchase genetic upgrades for their children at the cost of those children's health and social belonging, gestures toward a critique of class privilege with the commitment of someone gesturing toward a taxi they are not entirely sure is theirs.
What keeps the film from scoring higher on any single axis of cultural awareness is that it is too busy being a film about something else to be a film about the things it is nominally about. The AI allegory is present and accounted for, arriving precisely when the world had decided it was ready to receive it, and the promotional apparatus dutifully connected Klara's longing for human connection to contemporary anxieties about ChatGPT. Ishiguro's novel asked difficult questions about consciousness, sacrifice, and what we owe to the minds we create. Waititi's film asks whether you would like to feel something warm before the credits roll. The answer, at roughly $1.7 million in global grosses, appears to have been: not especially.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
When Klara, an Artificial Friend who wants nothing more than to find the perfect home, 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.
Questions about Klara and the Sun
Is Klara and the Sun woke?
No — Klara and the Sun is not especially woke, scoring 28 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Klara and the Sun have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (35). On Representation Casting: Jenna Ortega as a prominent Latina lead, Mia Tharia as a British-South Asian co-lead, and Rachel House in a supporting role constitute a meaningfully diverse ensemble.
How does Klara and the Sun compare to other 2026 movies?
It ranks #243 of the 800 films from 2026 we've scored; their average is 23. The wokest is Between Us (89).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.