Taika Waititi’s robot fable and Britain’s autumn gloom: culture’s climate reckoning

When robots teach us how to grieve

Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, has become the unexpected talking point of this year’s London Film Festival. The story—centred on a solar-powered artificial friend purchased to alleviate a teenage girl’s loneliness—resonates in a Britain where social isolation and technological dependency have become defining features of daily life. At a festival panel this week, young influencers described the film as their standout experience, praising its blend of humour and melancholy. Waititi, speaking to The Guardian, admitted his relief at the reception: “Thank God. I was worried we’d made something too quiet for the algorithm age.”

The film’s success lies in its refusal to moralise. Klara, the AI, is neither saviour nor villain; she is a mirror, reflecting the contradictions of human attachment in an era of ecological and emotional precarity. Ishiguro, who collaborated closely with Waititi on the screenplay, has said the story was never about technology itself, but about “how we love what we know we’ll lose.” That theme—grief as a shared condition—has struck a chord in a country grappling with the psychological toll of climate change, where even the weather now carries a weight of foreboding.

The anticyclonic gloom: when autumn feels like a metaphor

For the third consecutive October, Britain is locked under a high-pressure system that has turned the season into a study in grey. Meteorologists call it “anticyclonic gloom”: a phenomenon where stable air traps moisture near the ground, creating a persistent blanket of low cloud, mist, and drizzle. The effect is more than meteorological. In a country where sunlight has long been a cultural shorthand for optimism—think of the pastoral idealism of Constable or the golden-hour nostalgia of British cinema—this year’s autumnal pall feels like an environmental mood board.

Psychologists have begun to document what they term “circadian depression,” a form of seasonal affective disorder exacerbated by prolonged overcast conditions. The NHS has reported a 15% increase in referrals for light-therapy treatments since 2024, with clinicians noting that the psychological impact is compounded by the broader anxieties of climate instability. “It’s not just the lack of light,” said Dr. Eleanor Voss, a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital. “It’s the sense that the seasons themselves are becoming unreliable—that the rhythms we’ve built our lives around are breaking down.”

The phenomenon has seeped into cultural production. This month, the National Theatre’s revival of The Cherry Orchard has been staged with a deliberate emphasis on Chekhov’s themes of decay and inertia, while the Turner Prize shortlist includes two works that use weather data as raw material. One, by artist Jamila Hughes, maps the UK’s shifting cloud cover onto a series of abstract canvases, each titled with the date of a significant climate event. “I wanted to make the invisible visible,” Hughes said in her artist’s statement. “Not just the weather, but the way it shapes how we feel.”

Nature’s quiet comeback: a Sussex farm rewrites the rules

On a stretch of former wheatfields in West Sussex, a commercial nature restoration project has yielded an unexpected result: 5,290 butterflies, including rare small blues and dingy skippers, recorded in a single survey this month. The transformation of Halnaker Hill farm—133 hectares of intensively farmed land turned over to rewilding in 2024—has been so rapid that ecologists are now studying it as a case study in what they call “accelerated ecological succession.”

The project, led by the conservation group Wilding Britain, was designed as a proof of concept: could nature pay for its own recovery? The answer, so far, appears to be yes. The farm has become a destination for “conservation tourism,” with visitors paying to walk its trails and stay in its off-grid eco-pods. More significantly, it has begun selling “biodiversity credits” to developers seeking to offset environmental damage elsewhere—a controversial but increasingly common practice in the UK.

Critics argue that such schemes risk becoming a form of greenwashing, allowing corporations to buy their way out of meaningful change. “It’s not a substitute for systemic reform,” said George Monbiot, the environmental campaigner, in a recent Guardian column. “But if it keeps species from extinction while we argue about the bigger picture, I’ll take it.” Monbiot’s broader warning—that the world’s ruling classes would “rather burn the planet than share it”—hangs over the project. The farm’s success is undeniable, but it exists in the shadow of larger failures: the UK government’s approval of the Jackdaw gasfield this week, and the looming decision on the Rosebank oilfield, which could yet be rejected by the energy secretary.

What to watch for

The cultural and environmental stories of this autumn are converging in ways that feel both inevitable and unsettling. Klara and the Sun asks what it means to love in an age of artificiality; the anticyclonic gloom forces a reckoning with the emotional cost of climate disruption; and the Sussex farm offers a rare glimmer of hope—one that is as fragile as the butterflies it now shelters.

The question, as always, is what comes next. Will these cultural moments translate into political action, or will they remain what they are now: reflections of a society caught between denial and despair? The answer may lie in how Britain chooses to respond to the Rosebank decision. For now, the country is holding its breath—not just for the weather, but for the shape of its future.