An artificial friend can be bought. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, Klara initially stands in a shop: a so-called Artificial Friend, created to keep teenagers company. When Josie and her mother choose her, the sales promise becomes a family relationship – at least, that is how Klara sees it. Taika Waititi’s film adaptation opens in cinemas across Germany on 29 October 2026.
The crucial exchange is not simply money for technology. What is being bought is the prospect of affection: attentive, loyal, available. This is precisely where the unease that unfolds in Ishiguro’s futuristic tale lies. When intimacy is offered as a product, the question arises of whose need it fulfils – and who decides when it is enough.
A commodity that promises friendship
Klara is no ordinary domestic helper. She is meant not just to perform tasks, but to provide companionship. The novel is told from her perspective; her close observation of people reveals how differently she and her buyers can understand the same relationship. For the family, Klara is part of the purchased equipment for a life that is supposed to be controllable and capable of improvement. For Klara, her bond with Josie is the centre of her world.
This tension extends beyond the question of whether a machine can truly feel. People can feel drawn to an artificial voice or figure even when they know that no human counterpart is responding. That does not automatically make their feelings inauthentic. Yet such a relationship remains unequal: the system is offered, selected and used; others decide on its availability. The term ‘friend’ makes this asymmetry almost disappear.
Care with conditions attached
The novel is set in a future in which technological possibilities and social expectations are closely intertwined. Klara is meant to keep Josie company, but her role also touches on a larger promise: that care can be planned, procured and delegated to a machine. This is an attractive idea, particularly where people are lonely or support is lacking. At the same time, it shifts the focus from the conditions that make human connection possible to the properties of the product.
An artificial companion need not be tired, distracted or wilful. She can be designed to appear patient and adapt to one person. That sounds like a relief. But care consists of more than kindly attention. It requires reciprocity, responsibility and sometimes resistance too: a person can set boundaries, disagree or need help themselves. Companionship for sale, by contrast, promises availability above all. The convenience of the offer can become a tacit expectation that intimacy should make no demands.
In an overview of AI and well-being, the European Parliamentary Research Service points to the potential social support offered by AI companions, but also to research examining the risks that excessive use poses to well-being and human relationships. This is not a definitive answer to the question of whether such services help or harm. Rather, it highlights what matters: how they are used and designed, and which relationships they supplement – or displace.
Ishiguro’s quiet science fiction
Ishiguro, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, had already written a futuristic tale in Never Let Me Go in which technological possibilities expose an uncomfortable ordering of human life. Klara and the Sun likewise does not explain its world through an elaborate rulebook. Instead, it gradually becomes comprehensible through observations and hints. The science-fiction scenario serves less as a prediction than as a magnifying glass: it casts familiar needs and hierarchies in an unfamiliar light.
The film adopts the basic premise of the novel, published in 2021. Taika Waititi directed; Jenna Ortega plays Klara, Mia Tharia plays Josie and Amy Adams her mother. How the adaptation translates Ishiguro’s narrative perspective into images is a separate question – this background article does not pre-empt the answer. The starting premise is already clear: the subject is not the machine alone, but the human order that declares her a friend while treating her as a possession.
The cinema release thus leads to a question that neither enthusiasm for technology nor fear of it can settle: what exactly are people buying when they buy an artificial companion? Perhaps not friendship in the strict sense. Rather, the hope that someone will be there, remain attentive and not turn away. The price of that hope cannot be measured in money alone. It is also reflected in which forms of care a society organises itself – and which it would rather order as a product.
Original reviewed by the editors · 28 October 2026
