Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction is characterized by its focus on interiority, its perspective on the world typically that of an unassuming outsider with restricted knowledge or selective memory. Such limitations prove essential to the slow-burn emotional devastation of his deceptively straightforward stories. So it’s tough to imagine many filmmakers less suited to bringing his sensibility to the big screen than Taika Waititi, a tongue-in-cheek extrovert whose most recent literary adaptation, Jojo Rabbit, saw him jazz up Christine Leunens’s dark World War II novel Caging Skies with an imaginary, bumbling Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi himself. And yet, here he is at the helm of Klara and the Sun, a faithful adaptation that nevertheless strips away everything insightful and affecting from Ishiguro’s novel.

The film’s titular character (Jenna Ortega) is an AF (“artificial friend”), a robot companion for teens who’s spent her entire existence with other AFs in a struggling high-street store run by a frazzled, world-weary android they refer to as Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne). Klara passes her time standing mostly motionless in a window display, eagerly trying to parse the intricacies of human emotion from encounters she witnesses on the street and envying the more chic, technologically advanced AFs in the store across the way.

That is, until Josie (Mia Tharia) walks past the store one day, immediately recognizing a kindred spirit in this poorly coordinated, wide-eyed misfit with a peculiar habit of standing on one leg. Despite the protestations of Josie’s mother, Chrissy (Amy Adams), Klara is whisked away to their remote rural mansion and develops a close bond with Josie, as she learns more about the girl’s strained relationship with her mother and the mysterious death of her older sister.

Although Klara has little of the depth she possesses in Ishiguro’s novel, there’s a charm to Ortega’s undimmed earnestness here, as she somehow stays just on the right side of schmaltz. But contrasts are rarely drawn between Klara’s personality and the darkness of the dystopian society that birthed her, and there are few hints of the uncomfortable human truths she’s unable to access. In fact, Waititi’s film seems to take its cues primarily from her. Whereas Ishiguro dramatized the struggles of a machine consciousness learning how to be authentic and how to love, Waititi moves in the opposite direction, suggesting that we might have something to learn from the outlook of an adorkable, people-pleasing robot.

Among the many failures of Waititi and co-writer Davhi Waller to develop, or even commit to, the futuristic premise, perhaps the most egregious is their scant explanation of “lifting,” a genetic engineering procedure that Chrissy chose to carry out on her daughters. Being lifted has given Josie genius-level mental faculties but at the expense of serious, permanent damage to her physical health. There are a few scenes in which Adams effectively displays Chrissy’s feelings about this, a convincing mixture of guilt, stubbornness, and grief, but her performance is ultimately undercut by the absence of any clear information about the social or psychological pressures that might have swayed Chrissy one way or another. Like so many of the other ideas here, it appears incidental, without any deeper philosophical or emotional import.

Lacking real narrative or thematic connective tissue, Klara and the Sun begins to feel almost episodic, as it skips through potentially interesting scenarios haphazardly. And the film’s weak grasp on the significance of its own story means that, when Klara and Chrissy visit a pioneering scientist, Capaldi (Steve Buscemi), who reveals the truth about Klara’s role in the family unit, what should be a game-changing existential twist falls totally flat.

With AI advancing exponentially even since the 2021 release of Ishiguro’s novel, Klara and the Sun’s simplistic, YA-style presentation can’t help but feel like a major missed opportunity to say something important about what makes us truly human. Indeed, the degree to which the film wants to contribute to the cultural conversation could be surmised from Klara being told “you’re not the droid we’re looking for” early on, a self-aware Waititian audience wink that’s surely, at this point, just as outdated as the original Star Wars movies themselves. It’s also a line that suggests his mind is elsewhere, fixated on more lucrative IP, perhaps explaining why he displays such a profound lack of interest in his source material here.