And it’s not just Chrissie who gets a Hollywood flattening. Newcomer Mia Tharia’s Josie is a sickly genius who’s invariably kind to Klara and precociously self-aware in the vein of YA teen heroes everywhere. In Ishiguro’s novel, she’s often kind—but also cruel, dismissive, selfish, insecure, and in denial. The novel’s Josie seems to have an inkling that her mother plans to replace her with a robot in the event of her death, but she never allows herself to fully grapple with that painful truth. In Waititi’s telling, Josie has figured out her mother’s plan. The two of them work through their resentments, with Adams’s character telling her daughter, “I was never trying to replace you; I just didn’t want to lose you.” Which is not only cloying, but confusing: She definitely was trying to replace her!
Josie’s Dad and Rick
What we know about the contours of the film’s dystopia we mostly learn from Natasha Lyonne’s Store Manager, who regales her robots with bedtime stories about a pre-WWIII world where something called the internet existed before it got taken away. (There are humanoid androids in this world, but no internet?) But in the novel, we’re drip-fed other information about Ishiguro’s universe. For instance, Josie’s father, Paul (absent from the film), was a brilliant engineer who now lives off the grid in a “community” with other ex-white-collar workers, where they fashion weapons to defend themselves in tribal conflicts. He’s something of a doomsday prepper, but he credibly tells Josie that he’s living more authentically now than in his old life.
If Chrissie represents someone who opts into the ruling system, Paul’s character shows that there are choices even within this world’s oppressive parameters. The book doesn’t weigh in on which path is better; either includes decent people complicit in evil systems. “Most of us lack perspective,” says Ishiguro. “There’s something tragic about it…. Decent people trying really hard to contribute, yet because of this lack of perspective, they might be contributing to something bad.”
