We are becoming increasingly comfortable talking to machines. We ask them questions, follow their directions, trust them with practical tasks and sometimes respond as though there is a person on the other side of the conversation.
Most of us understand the difference. A machine may respond convincingly, but that does not mean it understands us.
Yet as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, the distinction is beginning to feel less straightforward. If a machine listens patiently, remembers what matters to us and behaves with apparent affection, does it matter that its understanding may be an illusion?
That question sits at the centre of Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel and now a film directed by Taika Waititi, starring Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams and Mia Tharia.
The film opened in UK cinemas on 23 October 2026, following its London Film Festival premiere. But its central idea is likely to remain relevant long after the theatrical run ends.
What does it mean to love somebody? And could an artificial intelligence ever know the answer?
An artificial friend who wants to belong
In Ishiguro’s novel, Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered companion designed for children. She begins her story in a shop, watching people through the window and hoping somebody will choose her.
She is unusually observant. She notices small changes in human behaviour, studies relationships and tries to understand the emotions that govern people’s decisions.
Eventually, she becomes the companion of Josie, a young girl living with serious illness and a complicated family situation.
Klara’s role is ostensibly simple: provide friendship. But she approaches that responsibility with a seriousness that is often absent from the humans around her.
The story is told through Klara’s perspective. Her understanding of the world is incomplete, and some of her conclusions are mistaken. Yet her observations can be surprisingly perceptive.
That is one of Ishiguro’s cleverest decisions. By allowing an artificial character to describe familiar human behaviour, he makes ordinary relationships appear strange.
The book’s publisher, Faber & Faber, presents the novel as an examination of what it means to love. Its science-fiction setting provides the circumstances, but the emotional questions are recognisably human.
Can a machine love someone?
Klara behaves as though she loves Josie. She pays attention to her, worries about her health and places Josie’s welfare above her own interests.
But does that amount to love?
One answer is that love requires an inner experience. A machine might recognise sadness and respond with comforting words, but without feeling affection or distress, it is merely following a process.
Another answer is more practical. We often judge love through behaviour. We recognise it in the way somebody cares for another person, makes sacrifices, pays attention and remains loyal.
Those two definitions become difficult to separate when the person offering care is artificial.
Imagine somebody who is consistently patient, attentive and dependable. Now imagine discovering that those qualities are produced by software.
Would the comfort they provided suddenly become worthless?
It is tempting to answer yes, because we want human relationships to involve genuine feeling. But that answer overlooks the experience of the person receiving the care.
If Josie feels less lonely because Klara is there, the improvement in her life is real, whatever the explanation for Klara’s behaviour.
That does not prove the machine can love. It does suggest that the value of companionship cannot be measured entirely by the emotions of the companion.
What makes Klara different from today’s AI?
The artificial intelligence available today is not the technology portrayed in Ishiguro’s novel.
Modern AI systems can process language, recognise patterns, analyse images and produce responses that resemble human conversation. Some can remember information within particular settings and adjust their responses to an individual’s preferences.
But conversational ability is not evidence of consciousness. Nor does a convincing expression of affection demonstrate that a system experiences love.
We do not have a reliable scientific test that establishes whether an AI system has subjective experiences. The question remains unresolved, and claims of machine consciousness should be treated cautiously.
The more immediate issue is how people respond to technology that appears socially aware.
Humans are predisposed to recognise intention and personality. We give names to cars, talk to pets as though they understand every word, and sometimes become irritated with computers as though they are deliberately being difficult.
With an AI companion, those tendencies can become much stronger.
A voice that responds naturally and remembers earlier conversations may encourage an emotional attachment, even when its behaviour has been deliberately designed to produce that response.
That raises questions which are not confined to science fiction. How should companies design systems that encourage personal relationships? How much should users know about the limits of those systems? And who is responsible if companionship becomes dependence?
Why loneliness matters to the story
That distinction between genuine feeling and convincing imitation becomes more troubling when companionship is something people need rather than simply enjoy.
One of the unsettling aspects of Klara and the Sun is the suggestion that artificial companionship has become an accepted response to human isolation.
In the novel’s imagined society, children face social pressures and technological changes that have altered ordinary relationships. Artificial Friends are sold as companions in circumstances where human friendship has become difficult.
The implication is uncomfortable. Rather than address the causes of loneliness, society has created a product intended to ease its effects.
That does not make artificial companionship inherently harmful. Technology can help people maintain contact, communicate and participate in activities that might otherwise be unavailable to them.
But there is a difference between technology that supports human relationships and technology sold as a replacement for them.
Klara’s existence raises the possibility that the second might eventually seem normal.
For a lonely person, an artificial companion that never becomes impatient, distracted or unavailable could be enormously appealing.
But a relationship without disagreement, competing needs or personal independence is unlike most human relationships. Its convenience may be part of its attraction, and part of its limitation.
Taika Waititi brings Ishiguro’s story to the screen
The film adaptation has an intriguing combination of director and material.
Taika Waititi is best known for films including Jojo Rabbit, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarok. His work frequently combines humour with loss, loneliness and difficult family relationships.
Klara and the Sun presents a different challenge: translating a novel whose emotional power depends heavily on the limited understanding of its narrator.
In a book, Ishiguro can place readers inside Klara’s observations. We gradually recognise things that she does not fully comprehend.
Cinema must communicate that difference through performance, images, sound and the relationship between characters.
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, while Mia Tharia portrays Josie and Amy Adams plays her mother. Aran Murphy plays Rick, an important figure in Josie’s life, with Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne also appearing in the film.
According to Sony Pictures’ official UK film information, Waititi shares screenplay credit with Dahvi Waller. The film runs for approximately 116 minutes and received a 12A classification in the UK.
Its world premiere at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival gave audiences an opportunity to see how Ishiguro’s carefully controlled narrative has been reinterpreted for the screen.
The interesting question is not simply whether the film follows the book closely. It is whether it can preserve the uncertainty that makes the novel so affecting.
The difficulty of translating Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s fiction often concerns people who misunderstand their own circumstances or suppress feelings they cannot comfortably acknowledge.
In The Remains of the Day, the emotional life of a devoted butler emerges through what he fails to say.
In Never Let Me Go, disturbing ideas about human identity and exploitation are revealed through an apparently ordinary account of childhood and friendship.
Klara and the Sun continues that interest in characters whose understanding is constrained by the world around them.
The challenge for a filmmaker is that subtlety can disappear when everything must be expressed visually or explained through dialogue.
A novel can spend pages exploring an observation whose meaning remains uncertain. A film has to decide what to show, what to withhold and how long an audience can be asked to wait for an answer.
Waititi’s established interest in vulnerable outsiders makes him an interesting choice. But Ishiguro’s material also demands restraint.
The story is strongest when it allows the audience to reach conclusions that Klara cannot.
What does it mean to be irreplaceable?
The most disturbing questions in Klara and the Sun concern identity rather than technology.
Could a person be reproduced through an accurate imitation of their behaviour, memories and personality? If somebody looked and behaved exactly like someone we loved, would that make them the same person?
It is a question that extends beyond the prospect of sophisticated robots.
We already preserve traces of people through photographs, recordings, messages and digital accounts. As artificial intelligence develops, it may become possible to construct increasingly convincing imitations of individuals from those records.
But resemblance is not identity.
Much of what makes a relationship valuable comes from shared history, unpredictability and the knowledge that the other person has a life independent of our own.
A perfect imitation could reproduce familiar words and mannerisms without restoring the person who originally spoke them.
Ishiguro invites us to consider whether love attaches to a collection of identifiable qualities or to something less easily described.
The novel does not offer a simple technological answer, which is precisely why its central question remains powerful.
A story about the present, not just the future
Science fiction is often discussed in terms of prediction. Did a writer correctly anticipate a device, invention or social change?
That is a limited way of approaching Klara and the Sun.
Ishiguro does not need to predict the precise development of artificial intelligence for the story to matter. His imagined world allows him to examine loneliness, parental anxiety, class differences, illness and the fear of losing someone.
Those concerns already exist.
It is a similar reason that older literary works continue to attract new adaptations. As we discussed in our feature on Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a different era can find new meaning in familiar questions about human behaviour.
The arrival of AI in everyday life gives Klara and the Sun particular force, but it does not create the emotional problems at the centre of the story.
We have always wanted to be understood. We have always feared abandonment. And we have always struggled to explain why one person can matter so much to another.
Can artificial intelligence really understand love?
The answer depends partly on what we mean by understanding.
A machine may eventually become extraordinarily good at recognising affection, predicting emotional needs and behaving in ways that people experience as loving.
Whether it can feel love is a different question, and one for which we have no established answer.
But Klara and the Sun asks us to consider something beyond the capabilities of machines.
Human beings are inconsistent. We make promises we fail to keep, misunderstand people close to us and sometimes behave selfishly towards those we care about most.
Klara, despite her limited understanding, tries to act with extraordinary loyalty.
That contrast is uncomfortable because the supposedly less human character can appear more compassionate than the people who created her.
Perhaps that is the story’s most telling observation. In trying to determine whether artificial intelligence can understand love, we are forced to examine how well we understand it ourselves.
