Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Directed by George Miller. Starring Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Burcu Gölgedar, Ece Yüksel, Erdil Yaşaroğlu, Aamito Lagum, Melissa Jaffer, Anne Charleston. [R]

Lush, complex visuals both supercharge and overwhelm this unconventional and quasi-rapturous fantasy-romance: a narratologist (Swinton) inadvertently awakens a djinn (Elba) who’s prepared to grant her three wishes, but she’s so content in her solitary life, no desires spring to mind to be wished for, and she’s rightfully concerned such power may backfire on her. Most of the film is spent watching the djinn spin yarns out of shimmering silken threads, ancient stories chronicling tragic romantic yearning across the centuries which also serve as cautionary tales, and it’s a pity Swinton and Elba do so little hot-blooded swooning in shared company, because when she decides she’s moved by his tales and wishes for them to fall in love, it’s hard to buy either the initial decision or the authority of the djinn’s power on making it so afterward. This is a movie that promotes grand, contradictory notions of existential love and fate and magic, yet it’s modern technology that ends up subverting our expectations of fairy-tale happiness, a theme so clumsily tackled, it’s about as substantive as Peter Pan telling children to believe they can fly. More importantly, for all of its provocative ideas and eye-filling CGI inventions, there’s also a curious absence of awe—Swinton hardly even seems surprised when she rubs a glass bottle and a colossal djinn suddenly fills her hotel room—and so when it comes to a sense of wonder, just like the three millennia worth of longing, I’m told it’s there, I’m shown it’s there, but I don’t feel it’s there. Based on a short story by A. J. Byatt (“The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”).

60/100