Three Thousand Years of Longing: Underwhelming fantasy that doesn’t fulfil its eastern promise

In the later stages of George Miller’s curious fantasy, one Alithea Binnie, in the always captivating form of Tilda Swinton, returns to a version of London that, largely shot in studio during the pandemic, has the unsettling quality of a Studio Ghibli dream sequence. Two peculiar neighbours pop heads over the fence to offer racist asides. She walks the streets in a mask. The sky feels like a screensaver.

Nothing in the supposed fantasy sequences is so satisfactorily odd. The body of the film comprises a trio of tales laying out how an irritable genie (comfortable Idris Elba) was repeatedly imprisoned in just the sort of bottle you’d expect. We hear about Solomon and Sheba. We move forward to Istanbul during the formative years of the Ottoman Empire. A few more centuries pass and we encounter another dusty story about the perennial tyrannies of the patriarchy. Miller, who knows a thing or two about extravagance, is plainly trying to magic us up something rotten, but the supposedly exotic visuals are so familiar — one thinks of a Fry’s Turkish Delight commercial remade with 21st-century CGI — that the yarns ultimately become deadening.

Happily, there is something deeply engaging in the framing story. Swinton just about escapes accusations of miscasting as a buttoned-up, socially awkward academic — a “narratologist” no less — on a journey to the Turkish capital for a conference (it’s a role that more obviously suits the likes of Sally Hawkins). Early on, she finds an attractive bottle in the bazaar. She scrubs it with her electric toothbrush and the genie emerges in the even more than usually enormous form of Idris Elba. The interactions between the two actors within the hotel room, a theatrical two-hander amid computer-generated mayhem, generates more tangled emotions and erotic buzz than anything in the recent, somewhat overpraised Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. “There is no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale,” Alithea says. That wariness rubs against the djinn’s infectious desperation to mostly electric effect.

The film’s efforts to deconstruct the art of narrative are less successful than those semi-romantic tussles. Based on a story by AS Byatt, Three Thousand Years of Longing longs to be a higher-brow Princess Bride, but has fewer fresh theses and considerably less charm than that classic. Miller has, as directors often will, followed up a succès d’estime — this is his first film since Mad Max: Fury Road — with something of a personal folly. Better that than bland boilerplate, but Three Thousand Years of Longing grates as often as it charms.