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In a much-bruited scene in Jean-Luc Godard ’s 1966 film “ Pierrot le Fou ,” the sui generis American filmmaker Sam Fuller turns up at a party and is asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo to define cinema. He says: “A film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word, emotions.”

“Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new film directed by the protean “Mad Max: Fury Road” creator George Miller , is very much a battleground. And very much about the emotion tagged in the title. In the case of Alithea, the academic played with traits both prim and feisty by Tilda Swinton , the longing is one she denies. Introducing herself in voiceover as a “narratologist,” that is, a studier of stories, she cherishes her solitary self-sufficiency. Arriving in a storybook-bright Istanbul for a conference, she’s put up in the Agatha Christie room of the Pera Palace Hotel. “She wrote Death on the Nile here,” Alithea is told. The movie will be about emotion, but also about storytelling and stories.

During a lecture Alithea faints after a hallucination. We are to ask, later, whether it was a hallucination or something ancient and real calling to her. Back in her hotel room, she tries to scrub off an ornamental bottle she picked up at an antique shop. And yes, she unleashes a genie, or djinn, and a giant one at that—the sight of his enormous foot opening her bathroom door is something unusual to be sure—who, upon learning some English, proffers Alithea the standard three wishes. As played by Idris Elba , the djinn is a figure grave, funny, absurd, and moving.

As for those wishes: not so fast. As a narratologist, Alithea knows that a djinn is one gift horse worth looking in the mouth. The wish-fulfillment narratives involving genies famously never work out—either due to the stupidity/venality of the wisher or, more pertinent to Alithea, the fact that genies are notorious tricksters. There’s a reason they end up trapped in bottles, after all. And so, rather than a wish-fulfillment journey, Alithea begins an interrogation.

The djinn’s first tale sets the tone and pace for the rest of the movie. He was a consort, or so he claims, and teacher to the famed Queen of Sheba (“She was not beautiful. She was beauty itself,” the Djinn avers, and in the form of actress Aamito Lagum , she indeed is), until that wily Solomon came along. Even the elaborate tableaux of Cecil B. DeMille aren’t sufficient preparation for the production design and CGI-driven phantasmagoria of this tale, which features, among other things, a kind of self-playing lyre, the better to augment the song of Solomon that seduces Sheba.

As it turns out, over the centuries, it’s always a woman who’s responsible for the djinn’s captivity, but this is not a nesting-doll tale of misogyny. (It is adapted, very loosely, from a novella by renowned British writer A.S. Byatt.) It’s more a chronicle of how love and hate can make one do funny things. And about the paradox of being human, our intrepid selves and our shadow selves. So much human achievement is depicted here, and so much human atrocity. As is observed near the end of the picture, “Despite all the whiz-bang, we remain befuddled.”

As the tales unfold, Alithea, while never entirely letting down her guard, comes to understand that the lack of love in her life is more upsetting than she’s been willing to admit to herself.

That sounds dry. The movie is not. The tales told by the djinn are packed with hair-raising violence and extremely variegated landscapes of lust. One would-be ruler, a very slow and heavy fellow, is confined to a sable-lined room by his mother, where he is supplied with a steady stream of women of unusual size, whom he drools over. This episode is staged and shot with Fellini-esque relish by Miller—it’s a bit of an elaboration on the wet nurse scene in “Fury Road.”

Speaking of “Fury Road,” after the mostly practical and in-camera effects of that hair-raising epic, it’s interesting to see Miller return to what appears to be a predominantly CGI mode, although given his work on films like “ Babe: Pig in the City ” and “Happy Feet,” it shouldn’t be unanticipated. His mastery makes the movie eye-popping; his freedom and audacity make it surprising and unsettling.

One may also be unsettled that the movie arguably partakes of what the scholar Edward Said called “orientalism.” Western culture taking Eastern culture and molding it to its own ends, to put it one way. In many respects Miller shows scrupulousness. The ancient world depicted here is not whitewashed in the casting department (Lagum, who plays Sheba, is Ugandan, and won the first season of “Africa’s Next Top Model”). But just the idea of a Black Djinn and a white Englishwoman in a battle of wits over narratives real and fictional is apt to strike a dissonant chord with some. Is Miller exercising his freedom as a creative artist or taking undue license? I believe the former. And I believe that the compassion and imaginative energy he brings to the project (this hardly looks like the work of a director who’s almost 80) justifies his choices, if indeed any justification were really necessary.

Available in theaters tomorrow.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Three Thousand Years of Longing movie poster

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence.

108 minutes

Tilda Swinton as Alithea Binnie

Idris Elba as Genie

Ece Yüksel as Gülten

Zerrin Tekindor as Kösem

Erdil Yaşaroğlu as Prof. Günhan

Kaan Guldur as Young Murad IV

David Collins as Jocular Storyteller

Alyla Browne as Young Alithea

Nicola Mouawad as King Solomon

Angie Tricker as Narratologist

George Miller

Writer (based upon the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by)

Augusta Gore

Cinematographer

Margaret Sixel
Tom Holkenborg

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: Desire, Once Upon a Time

George Miller directs a visually sumptuous, grown-up fairy tale with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. It jumps across time but too often just stumbles.

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By Manohla Dargis

There are storytellers, and then there is Scheherazade, the savvy bride who in “One Thousand and One Nights” entertains her husband, the king of Persia, by telling him stories. The king has a nasty habit of killing his wives, so to keep her head Scheherazade practices narrative interruptus: Each night, she relates wondrous tales without finishing them, keeping him hooked on her cliffhangers so that she can live another day. For her, storytelling is life.

The stakes are far lower for Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) in George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” A self-described narratologist, Alithea has meaningful work, reputational standing, a movieland dream house and a potential new chapter in a mysterious being (Idris Elba). She is also a storyteller. But unlike Scheherazade, Alithea risks nothing meaningful when she spins this yarn, a problem for a movie that insists on the importance of storytelling. Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.

The movie begins with a promising, characteristically energetic Miller-esque whoosh of swooping cameras, brisk editing, pops of colors and a sense of urgency. Things are about to happen! Except — as Alithea explains — everything to come has already occurred. “My story is true,” she says, adding: “You’re more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale.” And so, with a melodious once-upon-a-time voice, she revs up an elaborate story about a loquacious genie called, well, Djinn (Elba). Soon enough, the story skips back in time, she frees him from a bottle, he offers her three wishes and she reacts warily until she doesn’t.

Any movie with Elba and Swinton has its appeal, and the same holds true of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” which pulls you in every time they’re together onscreen. It takes flight with Alithea en route to a conference in Istanbul. Things quickly get weird, and a certain je ne sais what perfumes the air when she meets a peculiar fellow at the airport and encounters an even odder, ominous-looking stranger at the conference. During a lecture on storytelling, Alithea sits before huge images of modern gods like Batman and Superman, a display that gestures toward the continuity between new myths and those of the ancient world. And then she faints.

Certainly, Miller — whose fables include the Mad Max series — is keenly interested in the power of stories. But in “Years of Longing,” he has tethered himself to hopeless, uninvolving source material. That would be a self-reflexive, tediously long story by A.S. Byatt titled “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which also centers on a single, middle-aged British academic who (eventually) travels to Turkey, meets a genie, is offered three wishes and experiences several life-altering changes. Filled with literary allusions and deep thoughts, it is serious stuff, no doubt, but it’s also about a white woman getting laid by an exotic Other.

Race doesn’t factor into the original story, or maybe it does; I was so bored I admittedly resorted to skimming chunks of it. Whatever the case, the casting in the movie adds complications because of the way that cinema concretizes ideas. Actors don’t only play parts; they give those ideas flesh, histories, social and cultural meanings. Djinn is a captive to whoever releases him from the bottle; he’s a fictional creation, and this is a fairy tale. Yet it’s also a story in which a sexualized Black man is, at least initially, held captive to the desires of a lonely white woman who wants what he’s got — provocative terrain the movie ignores.

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” — it was written by Miller and his daughter, Augusta Gore — has more life than the original story, but it still drags. After Alithea unbottles Djinn, the two face off in her hotel room, where after some awkwardness and silliness (enter a wee Albert Einstein), they settle into matching hotel bathrobes, and he recounts the stories that shaped his previous 3,000 years. As the movie’s title announces, these are suffused with longing. The first involves the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), another turns on an enslaved girl (Ece Yuksel) and yet another on an unhappy wife (Burcu Golgedar).

All the stories have their appeal, and Miller, working with a predictably stellar crew, seems to have an enjoyable time playing with his digital tool kit. Yet his exuberance and delight are most evident — and most infectious — at the granular level. Although several of the tales are heavily populated, teeming with intrigues and swarming with minions, the movie charms most successfully with the beauty and wit of its filigreed details: the gleam of its polished surfaces, the hues of its variegated palette and the inventiveness of its smaller delights, like the bewitching musical instrument that plays itself with its own nimble hands.

Despite these flashes of playfulness, the stories blur rather than build. They’re overlong, for one, and because Djinn often narrates their characters’ words, thoughts and deeds, they rarely come alive. Much like the figurines in old-fashioned automaton clocks, they enter at the appointed time, execute clever bits of business and exit, leaving no impression other than admiration for clockmaker’s skill. Worse, they take you away from Alithea and Djinn. And while the last half-hour is lovely — it’s here that you see the movie, and feel the tenderness, that Miller himself clearly yearns to convey — by then, alas, the clock has almost run out.

Three Thousand Years of Longing Rated R for fairy-tale violence, nudity and sex. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Three Thousand Years of Longing Reviews

The stories that the Djinn tells are lovely, but the movie really lands in the second half when things get slightly more normal.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

The George Miller directorial, with its splendid imagery and sound so reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain trilogy and early Tarsem Singh, is the right kind of narrative to lose oneself in.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The characters in the film could have pondered the link between existence and storytelling in a far more intriguing fashion.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 25, 2023

As magical and trippy as Three Thousand Years of Longing wants to be, it gets lost in its own grand storytelling. Part of what makes stories enduring is their success at creating emotions within the audience, whoever they may be.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

George Miller invites us to a vibrant and ambitious epic that says it’s about the love of storytelling but seems to forget about giving love to its own story in the process.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

A romantic/erotic fantasy from director George Miller that begins with pure escapism and gradually works its way into your guts.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | May 24, 2023

So the visionary efforts are present, absolutely, but they’re not memorable without a consistently compelling narrative.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2023

[A] slightly unhinged piece of classic storytelling — and while it is visually luscious and bursting with (narrative) calories, it did not seem to make up its mind, to its very end, which genre, and indeed audience age-group, it actually belongs to.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 14, 2023

Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, is just the ticket for anyone wishing for something different to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2023

Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing is a challenge to those who feel content with loneliness, wrapped in their blankets of cynicism. It's as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the power of love and desire.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 30, 2022

For all the opposites these two characters are, they are drawn together in their hope for better... embraces fairy tale elements to a Brothers Grimm tee... a banquet of storytelling, sumptuous and delicious even when slightly bitter.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 28, 2022

The carefully controlled chaos is told in measured moments as two acting behemoths unravel the art of fantasy fables and ultimately, the power of a good love story.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2022

…a weird and occassionally wonderful visual mood-piece that’s all about story and the meaning and importance of story, but unfortunately omits to pack one of its own…

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 19, 2022

Visually rich and thematically dense, Three Thousand Years of Longing muses on romance and possession, as well as the slow death of mythology and folklore at the hands of science and capitalism.

Full Review | Dec 14, 2022

A wondrous film until the magic runs out in the last act.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 19, 2022

It’s out there but not as much as you think, well grounded in strong performances by Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

Alternating between charmingly and cringingly unfashionable, George Miller’s "Three Thousand Years of Longing" defies some orientalist tropes while falling prey to others.

Full Review | Nov 14, 2022

With Longing, Miller indulges in grandiloquent storytelling, while also making the case that there appears to be a serious lack of it in our popular culture.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2022

The result is an eye-popping, handsomely mounted celebration of the power of stories aimed at adults, but every bit as spry and playful as a children's storybook.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2022

One of the year's truly special films.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 16, 2022

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'Three Thousand Years of Longing' will leave you charmed — and a little worn out

Justin Chang

Tilda Swinton plays a literary scholar and Idris Elba is the Djinn she conjures in Three Thousand Years of Longing . Festival de Cannes hide caption

Tilda Swinton plays a literary scholar and Idris Elba is the Djinn she conjures in Three Thousand Years of Longing .

I've always felt there's something a bit too self-conscious about movies that are explicitly about the magic of storytelling. Really, the best way to pay tribute to storytelling is to simply tell a good story, not rattle on and on about how timeless stories are. That may explain why I felt both mildly charmed and a little worn out by the new movie Three Thousand Years of Longing .

It's adapted from a short story by the English writer A.S. Byatt , and much of it unfolds in an Istanbul hotel room where Idris Elba , taking a page from Scheherazade and her 1,001 nights , regales Tilda Swinton with one fantastical tale after another. Some of these tales are vivid and involving, but what they add up to is less than the sum of its many shimmering parts.

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'mad max' director george miller: the audience tells you 'what your film is'.

Even still, the movie has its undeniable pleasures. The Australian director George Miller might be best known for his thrilling Mad Max series, but he's always had a flair for fantasy, as he's shown in marvelously inventive films like Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet . In Three Thousand Years of Longing , which he co-wrote with his daughter, Augusta Gore, Miller unveils an outlandish premise with a sly wit that's initially hard to resist.

Tilda Swinton plays Alithea Binney, a modern-day literary scholar who specializes in the study of narratives, the way the same tropes and symbols tend to pop up in stories from different cultures and eras. While attending a conference in Istanbul, Alithea goes shopping in the bazaar and purchases a small glass bottle as a memento.

Later, while she's cleaning the bottle in her hotel room, out in a burst of smoke pops an enormous Djinn, played by Elba. After some amusing awkwardness — how would you react if confronted by a giant otherworldly intruder with hairy blue legs and pointy ears? — the two settle into a long, heady and whimsical conversation. Also, they're both wearing those plush white hotel bathrobes, in the movie's most charming visual.

The Djinn tells Alithea that he was trapped in the bottle roughly three millennia ago by King Solomon. The only way for him to be freed is to grant three wishes to any human who possesses the bottle. You'd think that Alithea would jump at the chance, but being an expert on stories, she knows that wishes have a way of backfiring. And so she refuses to play along.

Alithea has long seemed content with her solitary existence. She was married once but now has no family, and books have provided the only companionship she needs. But as she talks to the Djinn, her long-forgotten desires for love and connection begin to surface. The movie's point seems to be that these desires, or longings, lie at the heart of every great story.

The Djinn knows this firsthand: He tells Alithea about all the women he's fallen for over the centuries, starting with his first great love, the Queen of Sheba. More recently, his bottle fell into the hands of a brilliant 19th-century woman who used her wishes not to acquire power or riches, but rather to gain more knowledge about the world. Their love burned bright for a spell but ended, like the others, in tragedy. This is why the Djinn has never been able to break free; his love for the humans who command him proves his undoing.

Miller dramatizes those stories in vibrant flashbacks decorated with all manner of ornate visual effects; sometimes the results can be garish, but sometimes they're genuinely entrancing. At their best, the Djinn's stories achieve the quality of a great page-turner. But the movie becomes less effective as it raises the possibility of romance between Alithea and the Djinn. Swinton and Elba are both superb and have a sweet, touching chemistry, but they never forge the kind of bond that feels passionate enough to transcend time and space.

The movie tosses off some fascinating ideas in the closing stretch, including the way a Djinn might feel redundant in a world where technology has become its own modern-day magic. But Three Thousand Years of Longing ends on a muted, uncertain note. It left me faintly curious about what might happen next, which is not quite the same thing as wanting more.

Cast & crew
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Three Thousand Years of Longing

A lonely scholar, on a trip to Istanbul, discovers a Djinn who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. A lonely scholar, on a trip to Istanbul, discovers a Djinn who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. A lonely scholar, on a trip to Istanbul, discovers a Djinn who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.

George Miller
Augusta Gore
Tilda Swinton
Erdil Yasaroglu
373 User reviews
205 Critic reviews
60 Metascore
4 wins & 18 nominations

Prof. Günhan
Airport Djinn

British Council Lady …
The Queen of Sheba

King Solomon

Prince Mustafa

Sultan Suleiman

The Old Storyteller

Ozmet the Jocular
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Cinematographer John Seale came out of retirement for the second time to shoot this movie. He'd previously done so in 2012 to shoot George Miller 's previous film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) .
Goofs The Djinn says that his third story begins in 1620, after 100 years of wandering invisibly following the death of Gulten and Mustafa. But Mustafa died in 1553, only 67 years before 1620.

Alithea Binnie : Love is a gift. It's a gift of oneself given freely. It's not something one can ever ask for.

Crazy credits Idris Alba and Tilda Swinton were double-billed in the opening credits.
Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: The Most Theatre Walkouts I've EVER Seen | Cannes 2022 Explained (2022)
Soundtracks Cautionary Tale Music written by Tom Holkenborg (as Tom Holkenborg) Lyrics by Augusta Gore , George Miller Performed by Matteo Bocelli , Tom Holkenborg (as Tom Holkenborg) Produced by Tom Holkenborg (as Tom Holkenborg) Matteo Bocelli appears courtesy of Capitol Records

User reviews 373

Aug 25, 2022
How long is Three Thousand Years of Longing? Powered by Alexa
August 26, 2022 (United States)
United States
Greek, Ancient (to 1453)
Thousand Years of Longing
University of Sydney, Camperdown, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (on location)
Kennedy Miller Mitchell
Kennedy Miller Productions
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$60,000,000 (estimated)
Aug 28, 2022
$20,282,422

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 48 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Surround 7.1
Dolby Atmos

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: George Miller’s Wishy-Washy Fantasy Has Serious Story Problems

The gonzo 'Mad Max' director would've done well to stick to what works in a movie overdetermined to upset what’s come before.

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In the brain-tickling eyesore that is “ Three Thousand Years of Longing ,” Tilda Swinton plays a narratologist, which is to say, someone who studies stories. Her character, Dr. Alithea Binnie, thinks she’s heard them all, so she’s ahead of the game when she suddenly finds herself at the center of a whopper, a modern-day fairy tale involving a djinn ( Idris Elba ) ready and eager to grant her three wishes. Some movies aspire to uncover the meaning of life. This one aims to uncover the meaning of movies — as director George Miller attempts to crack the all-encompassing formula for story, the way Albert Einstein did for theoretical physics.

That’s an awful lot for any filmmaker to bite off, but then, this is George Miller we’re talking about, and where else does one go after making the ne plus ultra of action movies, “Mad Max: Fury Road”? Many will describe “Three Thousand Years of Longing” as a relatively small project for such a creatively ambitious director, who also made penguins dance (“Happy Feet”) and pigs talk (“Babe”). Perhaps it is, though this unconventional romance — adapted from A.S. Byatt’s “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” and told by Swinton’s character — spans two continents, three millennia and myriad languages, trying to fashion an utterly original love story from the recycled clichés of everything that has come before.

These days, audiences are so savvy about the tricks at a filmmaker’s disposal that the movie’s greatest achievement is that it seizes our imagination (or perhaps that’s our attention-deficit disorder being so brusquely manhandled) and holds it for the better part of two hours, defying us to anticipate what comes next. Sure, the first turning point is predictable enough. One can’t have a wishing story without a djinn-in-a-bottle any more than one can have a Tom Collins without a bottle of gin, after all. But once the magic vessel has been activated, it’s anybody’s guess where this kooky roller coaster is going.

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Alithea believes that “all gods and monsters outlive their original purpose” and is understandably skeptical of a mythical creature like Elba’s pointy-eared spirit, trying to approach the situation as logically as possible. That’s a tall order for Miller, who is basically a professional daydreamer, and Swinton, whose openness to off-the-wall collaborations is why we love her in the first place. Here, we’re supposed to believe that she’s a conservative soul too levelheaded and dispassionate to take the djinn up on his offer.

That puts the onus on him to sway this wary new master, who’s convinced that wishes always backfire because that’s how they inevitably turn out in every story that any culture tells about them — which isn’t true, mind you. Just ask Walt Disney, who made a career of granting wishes, no strings attached. Still, it feels relatively novel to encounter a character in Alithea’s position who rejects the offer to have her heart’s desire made manifest. She’s at a point in her life where she doesn’t want anything, she tells the spirit.

But the djinn has at least one thing she craves: He’s full of stories, and for most of the movie’s running time, he will regale Alithea with the accounts of his past masters, and how freedom has evaded him for so many centuries. That’s as powerful an aphrodisiac as one could spring on a know-it-all narratologist, and Alithea listens not like a scholar — and certainly not like a critic — but more like a child, delighted to be hearing the real-deal history behind the legend of Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) and Sheba (Aamito Lagum), which looks like a tacky Zack Snyder fantasy executed on a fraction of the budget, or something that Tarsem might have rejected for one of his music videos.

Seriously, what possessed Miller and “The Chronicles of Narnia” production designer Roger Ford to settle for such egregiously artificial, predominantly virtual sets? The movie’s poorly rendered backdrops look dated already: endless fake deserts, above which loom garish CG palaces, with their Maxfield Parrish interiors and naked (or else nearly nude) courtesans and queens. The movie has a weird problem with private parts, both male and female, which spend most of their time hidden just out of frame, but occasionally flop into view when a pregnant slave spreads her legs directly into the camera or a djinn’s tastefully shadowed djenitalia loll into the light.

Whether or not Miller’s aesthetic is for you, it’s basically his brand to reject what more traditional filmmakers think of as “good taste.” He’s one of an odd group of ’80s schlock filmmakers who hit the big time — a class that includes “Dead Alive” auteur Peter Jackson and “Evil Dead’s” Sam Raimi — expanding their vision to ever greater budget while sticking to the trick shots and gonzo stunts that betray their B-movie roots.

After the Sheba sequence, the djinn spends 1,500 years in a brass vase, reemerging in the Istanbul of the early Ottoman Empire, where the second in line to be sultan spends his adulthood locked in a harem with corpulent concubines. One, dubbed “Sugar Lump” (Anna “Betty” Adams), all but smashes the vase with her hefty hindquarters. Flash-forward another couple centuries, and the djinn is on call once again, this time answering to an insatiably curious woman named Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar) who wishes to possess all the knowledge that is good and beautiful in the world. That’s a noble goal, though she’s before her time, a brilliant woman trapped in a sexist culture. A well-crafted wish would no doubt solve that, but Miller prefers to make his putatively feminist point via a vulgar sex scene.

The djinn proceeds to explain how he found Zefir’s intelligence irresistible, all but sabotaging his own fate to spend a few months madly in love with her. Alithea and author Byatt clearly know more about djinns than the average viewer, but it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in narratology to realize this spirit is crossing some serious conflict-of-interest boundaries. What effect will this supernatural oversharing have on Alithea? Why, it’s foreplay, of course, for the movie’s last act, in which the djinn may as well be bottled up again by Alithea’s desire to experience a love on par with the world’s greatest romances. (Theirs seems like weak tea by comparison.)

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” arrives at a moment when storytellers are going all meta on worn-out formats, the way “Russian Doll” reshuffled the “Groundhog Day” genre or “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did the multiverse rulebook. Maybe jaded audiences will appreciate how self-consciously innovative Miller’s spin on the djinn movie is trying to be. Or maybe they’ll find themselves asking why someone with Alithea’s training can’t tell a more coherent story, when Joseph Campbell’s tried-and-true monomyth has worked so well for Miller before.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of competition), May 20, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 108 MIN.

Production: (Australia-U.S.) A Metro Goldywn Mayer Pictures presentation, in association with Filmnation Entertainment, Elevate Production Finance, Sunac of a Kennedy Miller Mitchell production. Producers: Doug Mitchell, George Miller
Crew: Director: George Miller. Screenplay: George Miller, Augusta Gore, based on the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt. Camera: John Seale. Editor: Margaret Sixel. Music: Tom Holkenborg.
With: Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Nicolas Mouawad, Aamito Lagum, Megan Gale, Zerrin Tekindor, Oğulcan Arman Uslu, Zack Braddy, Anna “Betty” Adams, Burcu Gölgedar. (English, Greek dialogue)

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Idris elba and tilda swinton in george miller’s ‘three thousand years of longing’: film review | cannes 2022.

The Australian director returns to Cannes after ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ with this adult fairy tale about an academic visiting Turkey, who uncorks a genie in a bottle that’s not Christina Aguilera.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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If you think about Three Thousand Years of Longing as an ethereal palate cleanser for George Miller between the dystopian rigors of Mad Max: Fury Road and the soon-to-shoot prequel, Furiosa , I suppose it kind of makes sense. And I suppose it makes sense within the distinctive filmography of “mad genius” Miller, as he’s described in the marketing; the Australian director has always had an interest in fairy tales, usually with a darkish edge, whether it’s Babe: Pig in the City , The Witches of Eastwick or even Happy Feet .

But this cerebrally sexy shot of One Thousand and One Nights -adjacent whimsy strains so hard for beguilement and timelessness that it’s ponderous and heavy. The film is basically an extended dialectic between a scholar of storytelling and mythology and a djinn she uncorks from a bottle purchased in a dusty Istanbul souk. Audiences eager to be enchanted by adult fairy tales might find something in the talky reflections on love and desire, on isolation and connection, the latter themes amplified by our recent memories of pandemic confinement. If that sounds like your thing, knock yourself out.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: MGM Production company: Kennedy Miller Mitchell Cast: Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Aamito Lagum, Nicolas Mouawad, Ece Yüksel, Matteo Bocelli, Lachy Hulme, Megan Gale, Zerrin Tekindor, Oğulcan Arman Uslu, Jack Braddy, Burcu Gölgedar Director: George Miller Screenwriters: George Miller, Augusta Gore, based on the short story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye , by A.S. Byatt Producers: Doug Mitchell, George Miller Executive producers: Dean Hood, Craig McMahon, Kevin Sun Director of photography: John Seale Production designer: Roger Ford Costume designer: Kym Barrett Music: Tom Holkenborg Editor: Margaret Sixel Visual effects supervisor: Paul Butterworth Casting: Nikki Barrett

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: George Miller’s First Movie Since ‘Fury Road’ Is a Wish Come True

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. MGM releases the film in theaters on Friday, August 26.

A bittersweet modern fairy tale from one of cinema’s most bombastic virtuosos, George Miller ’s “ Three Thousand Years of Longing ” might have some reservations about the 21st century — the movie often wrestles with the impact that science and technology might have on our ancient sense of wonder — but at the bottom of this tightly bottled epic sits a question that should resonate especially hard with people who have spent too many of the last 3,000 days stuck inside their homes with nothing but “content” to keep them company: Are stories enough to satisfy our lives?

Acclaimed narratologist Dr. Alithea Binnie ( Tilda Swinton , as if “acclaimed narratologist Dr. Alithea Binnie” could possibly be played by anyone else), would like to think so. Once upon a time she was married to a handsome academic, but when that schmuck left her for someone younger, she learned to make peace with her solitude. Being on her own — no partners, no parents, no children — affords a brilliant mind like hers the freedom it needs to flourish (read: travel the planet giving Powerpoint presentations about how the myths once used to contain all of the world’s mystery have so little value that they can now be contained by comic books).

In fact, Alithea is so content with her situation that she can’t think of anything to ask for when a massive, shirtless Djinn with a long, long, long -standing obsession with fulfilling women’s deepest desires puffs into her Istanbul hotel room — the same Istanbul hotel room where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express” — and offers her three wishes. Even with an orange-flecked goatee and a pair of pointy elf ears that are always on fire, a half-naked Idris Elba the size of a school bus would probably be enough to leave a lot of people feeling like they only had one wish left. But Alithea is unmoved.

Until, that is, the Djinn starts regaling the skeptical narratologist with floridly wistful stories about the Queen of Sheba, the slave girls of Suleiman the Magnificent, and all of the other beauties who defined his journey through the millennia.

If this all sounds like the stuff of a single-location pandemic movie, don’t fret: George Miller cannot be contained. For one thing, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is based on an A.S. Byatt short story that Miller has been hoping to adapt since the late ’90s, and the project wasn’t conceived with any COVID parameters in mind.

More to the point, this is still the same guy whose most recent film was “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The same guy who once shot a biodrama about a kid dying from a degenerative brain disorder with the madcap energy of a Ken Russell musical, and made the sequel of a beloved family movie about a talking pig into a magically deranged adventure that starts with Babe almost murdering James Cromwell and then spirits him away to a hostile city pets full of poodle prostitutes, homicidal chimpanzees, and one very deranged Mickey Rooney. George Miller could find more cinema in a single hotel minibar than some contemporary directors could squeeze out of an entire galaxy far, far away, and he manages to do exactly that without unbalancing the delicate soul of the intimate two-hander he wields here.

Maximalist in its mediativeness and meditative in its maximalism, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” might seem to beg for a scale on par with similarly many-splendored epics like “Cloud Atlas” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but Miller’s film can’t afford to grow so vast that its various stories overshadow the purpose of telling them. The result is a movie that splits the difference between “Arabian Nights” and “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” as the script’s frequent (but super economical) asides to the Ifrit-haunted palaces of ancient Yemen or the sable-lined sex prisons of the Ottoman Empire never stray all that far from Tilda Swinton listening along in her terrycloth bathrobe; the movie isn’t necessarily sedate, but it’s always looking for a kind of lasting serenity that Miller’s films have never sought before.

Alithea’s familiarity with classic myths leaves her both refreshingly unfazed by her impromptu date with a Djinn, and also deeply suspicious that he might be a trickster in disguise. After all, what story about free wishes doesn’t turn into a cautionary tale by the end? Her goading uncertainty prompts the Djinn — who’s been so desperate to share his memories with someone, and could never have dreamed of finding such a receptive audience — to regale Alithea with his misfortunes as if doing so might itself be enough to free him from his bottle forever.

Swinton, it goes without saying, is peerlessly good at threading the needle between earthy distrust and otherworldly understanding, while Elba (iffy CG smoke-trails and all) manages to draw a tender study of loneliness out of a mythical creature that Hollywood has long reduced to a hoary trope. In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast.

With all due respect to Robert Ford’s production design (it’s never a bad thing when a movie’s sets earn comparison to “The Fall”), or the impressive degree of freakiness that Miller and his team are able to stuff into a single image of Solomon wooing Sheba, the Djinn’s tales are always more compelling for his sad and self-deprecating commentary on them than they are for any of their murder hijinks. Miller’s penchant for garish slapstick often strains for laughs in story threads that have more pressing things to do with their time, and his most orgiastic subplot ends with a cheap punchline that hits a bit below the belt. Then again, there’s also a scene where a guy’s head falls off and turns into one of cinema’s gnarliest demon spiders and then explodes into a zillion smaller spiders and it’s hard to complain about any movie that can fit that into a super touching middle-aged romance.

And, despite its excessive use of Papyrus, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is touching — more so than it seems primed to become for most of its running time, and more so than its disjointed structure seems able to allow. The chemistry between Swinton and Elba grows increasingly potent as the film pivots into its very different third act, and even Miller’s weirdest swings (including a belabored scene built around a metal detector) are supported by their collective suggestion that finding true love isn’t any less fantastical than meeting an immortal Djinn who’s been using his “subtle fire” to give women smoke orgasms for 3,000 years.

Our lives are so embarrassingly replete with wonders that flying through the sky or summoning cars to your door with a piece of magic glass no longer move the needle, but there are still plenty of things that people don’t understand about the world around them, or refuse to understand about the people with whom they share it (as you might glean from the film’s abrupt pivot towards social commentary at the 11th hour). “Three Thousand Years of Longing” finds that even the most ancient tales can prove illuminating about those things if they’re told with enough gusto, but also that it’s so much easier for us to see ourselves in those stories if we have someone to share them with.

“Three Thousand Years of Longing” premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. MGM will release it in theaters on Friday, August 26.

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Review: In ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing,’ the existential questions go unanswered

Two people in white hotel bathrobes converse.

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Australian filmmaker George Miller’s latest cinematic exploration of humanity is a far cry from the dusty, diesel-fueled “Mad Max” franchise for which he is known, and it proves a moment of respite between 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” and the currently filming prequel to that film, “Furiosa.”

Based on the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, adapted by Miller and Augusta Gore, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is a philosophically ambitious project, a cerebral exploration of the function of storytelling in human existence and the meaning of desire.

It is a nested Matryoshka doll of stories. The outer layer is told by Alithea ( Tilda Swinton ), a narratologist who has made her way to Turkey for a conference. Upon arrival, she starts to encounter mysterious, magical figures, what she calls djinn (another word for “genie,” referring to the Muslim belief in invisible spirits that inhabit the world and take the form of humans or animals). While giving a talk about the continuing purpose of myth in our modern, science-based world, she is spooked by a djinn in the audience and faints.

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The film’s script is so densely packed with mythological insight that some scenes almost gloss over interesting concepts like the one Alithea discusses in her talk, which questions the function of gods, monsters and creation myths in everyday life when we have science to tell us where we came from. But even if Miller doesn’t linger on these ideas, they remain in the background of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” constantly informing the rest of the film.

The story inside Alithea’s belongs to the main djinn she encounters after purchasing a mysterious glass bottle in a bazaar and scrubbing it clean. The Djinn ( Idris Elba ), explodes into her hotel room, requesting that she make three wishes. Alithea declines, insisting that stories about making wishes are cautionary tales, and there’s really nothing she needs or desires in her independent, solitary, academic life. The pair, clad in white hotel robes, sit for a chat, and the Djinn tells his story, of the three times he’s been “incarcerated” in his bottle, and the danger of wishes unfulfilled, which rob him of his purpose.

Rendered with stunning beauty and daring visuals by Miller, these 3,000 years of history, from the Queen of Sheba through various slaves and sultans and trips to the bottom of the Bosporus, explore the danger of wishing and the undeniable power of desire. In hearing the Djinn’s story, Alithea comes to understand her purpose, which is to love him. Whether they can harmoniously coexist in the modern world, full of so many busy frequencies and electromagnetic fields, is another question altogether.

Miller’s vision is an earnest and high-minded one, with more insights about humanity and storytelling packed into a tossed-off moment than most entire films contain. But it’s also a deeply odd film, spanning centuries but contained to the interaction between Alithea and the Djinn. In line with core tenets of Miller’s genre-spanning work, it most clearly espouses the questions of human existence, human desire and how it’s desire that makes us human, whether for love or survival or both.

Miller asks the audience to level up its existential exploration, posing questions about the purpose of storytelling and, perhaps, about the lack of magic in our technological, science-driven world. But the film doesn’t offer any concrete answers, leaving us adrift in a sea of provocative queries. For a film about narrative, it meanders, and loses focus.

The only messages or lessons in “Three Thousand Years of Longing” are to be gleaned ourselves from the clues left behind, which is a fascinating — if a bit frustrating — experience.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'Three Thousand Years of Longing'

Rated: R, for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: In general release Aug. 26

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One of the Greatest Fabulists of Our Time Is Back With Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller will forever be known (rightly so) as the Mad Max guy, but he has also been, for much of his career, one of our great fabulists. Even when he made a film based on a true story (1993’s Lorenzo’s Oil , a masterpiece), he did so with a kind of operatic flamboyance generally reserved for melodrama and myth. His latest, Three Thousand Years of Longing , is not based on fact — it’s been adapted, with quite a few liberties, from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novella The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye — but it does start with the following assertion: “My story is true. You’re more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale.” That sentiment could apply to any of Miller’s films.

Much like the Thousand and One Nights tales that clearly inspired it, Three Thousand Years of Longing features one narrator setting the stage for another narrator. The first voice we hear belongs to Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), an internationally renowned narratologist who, during an academic conference in Istanbul, purchases a blown-glass bottle at the city’s famed Covered Bazaar and unleashes a Djinn (Idris Elba) who has been trapped inside it. The Djinn, who must grant Alithea three wishes so that he can be released from captivity for good, then relates to her his own ornate journey: It starts with his love for the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) and his sorrow at seeing her fall for the erotic wiles of King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad), then moves on to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent (Lachy Hulme), the brutal reign of Murad IV (Oğulcan Arman Uslu), the interregnum of Ibrahim the Mad (Jack Braddy), and, finally, to the harem of an elderly Turkish merchant in the 19th century, where the Djinn falls for the old man’s brilliant, ambitious, and frustrated young wife, Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), after granting her the wish of total knowledge.

His story is romantic, and ironic, and fantastic, so Miller leans into the exoticism of the setting and the subject, as well as the winding cadences of the Thousand and One Nights , where a tale might start by leaping centuries and geographies before landing some place specific. It’s a particular, world-traversing rhythm that anyone brought up on such stories will immediately recognize. It enhances both the sense of wonder and the element of surprise, but it also adds a metaphorical kick to a given fable — suggesting that its lessons, such as they are, transcend borders and years. What those long-ago storytellers did with words, Miller does with images, his camera glancing across epic vistas like a rock skipping across a pond.

But for all the byzantine (heh) turns of the film’s narrative, if you had to distill this story to its fable-like essence, you might simply say it’s the tale of a Djinn who grants three wishes to a woman who refuses to ask for anything. Alithea initially resists the Djinn’s entreaties, correctly pointing out that stories about wishes coming true usually turn out to be cautionary tales. As we learn, however, she’s also resisting his offer because she wants to avoid opening herself up to any kind of want, which in turn would open her up to hurt. To ask for something is to acknowledge a desire, and Alithea has already lost quite a bit on that front. Of course, the Djinn’s own millennia-spanning tales of longing — for love, for knowledge, for independence — begin to inspire her yearning as well.

As the Djinn, Elba has a captivating melancholy that speaks to the fact that he has seen and felt so much; he’s loved and been loved, and he’s betrayed and been betrayed. Contrary to the one-note, “Your wish is my command!” hocus-pocus of other genie-types we’ve seen onscreen, this character actually has an inner life, even if he still retains a sense of mystery. In fact, the film is as much his story as it is hers. Perhaps even more his than hers. Alithea initially doesn’t have all that much to do except listen. But Swinton’s expressionistic face can compellingly convey the most elaborate emotional journeys. An intellectual eager to untangle and compartmentalize everything, her character starts off as cynical and superior, but gradually becomes more vulnerable and open. She begins, in other words, to want.

And that, naturally, comes with its perils for both of them. In its final act, Miller’s film moves to England and transforms into something quite striking. The Djinn wanders today’s world, observing the scientific marvels of modern life, which in his telling gain their own fantastical aura, and begins to mull the idea that this world might not have room for beings like himself. Meanwhile, granting Alithea her wishes might well be corroding his existence.

It is at this point that we may realize, if we haven’t already, that all the film’s tales have turned on images of captivity — from the Djinn’s imprisonment in the bottle, to the Ottoman sultans and their infamous golden cages, to the physical confinements of a forced, loveless marriage. Concurrent to all that, a spiritual and emotional entrapment runs through the picture as well — from the sweet hypnosis of a story that seems to have no end, to the idea of a love that cannot be given freely. Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life.

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The Whimsical, Intellectual Chemistry of Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton

Three Thousand Years of Longing gives the genie-in-a-bottle formula a fresh update and a deeply romantic spin.

Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton standing in a doorway in "Three Thousand Years of Longing"

George Miller’s 2015 insta-classic Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most propulsive movies ever made. It tracks a caravan of souped-up vehicles blasting across the desert in a glorious postapocalyptic battle. His follow-up is, on the surface, quite the opposite. Three Thousand Years of Longing is primarily focused on a long conversation between two characters wearing bathrobes in a fancy Turkish hotel room. But that first impression sells the film short. Miller’s latest work, about an introverted professor (played by Tilda Swinton) and the djinn she accidentally summons to her room (Idris Elba), is an intimate romance—one that sacrifices none of Miller’s glorious maximalism.

The film, based on a short story by A. S. Byatt, is a piece of magical realism that has a lot in common with Miller’s fanciful works, such as The Witches of Eastwick and Babe: Pig in the City . Miller’s constant strength is his sense of wonder—he can conjure up the most unexpected spins on familiar iconography and expressions. Three Thousand Years of Longing makes use of the hoary adage Be careful what you wish for as an insistent genie demands that his summoner pour out her heart’s desires to him. But Miller quickly transforms that dynamic into an intriguing exchange of intellects: The djinn and the academic match wits, and their conversational dance melts into deeper passion.

The professor character, Alithea Binnie, specializes in narratology, the study of story structure. After she frees the djinn, who has been imprisoned for millennia with only brief sojourns into the real world, she worries about all the wish-giver plot clichés—that he’s a powerful being simply looking for his freedom or a trickster eager to bend her every word against her. But though the djinn is a commanding figure (Elba’s performance is suave and worldly), his motives are sweetly tender. He wants only to help Alithea find happiness. She claims she’s already content in her solitary state, a point she perhaps protests a little too much.

Both characters are avid storytellers, and the film soon dives into the genie’s best tales, some of which can be traced back to antiquity. At various points, he encountered the Queen of Sheba (a stunning Aamito Lagum); the Ottoman prince Mustafa, son of Suleiman (Matteo Bocelli); and a 19th-century Turkish genius named Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar). In every case, the djinn tried to enrich those wishers’ lives, and in every case, his efforts went in winding, unpredictable directions, often leading to tragedy. Many of the parables are about corruption, and the djinn’s lamp certainly lends its owner a dangerous level of power. Throughout the film, Miller looks at how indulging our wants can be equally satisfying and destructive.

Alithea is an interesting challenge for the djinn—she truly thinks of herself as a woman without major desires, whose academic career is successful enough to compensate for any shortcomings in her personal life. Swinton often plays authoritative enigmas with aplomb, but here, she has to be the djinn’s flustered foil, meekly dodging his efforts to crack her emotional force field. Elba, who frequently projects toughness or villainy on-screen, gets to be fish-out-of-water funny with bouts of melancholy. The djinn has been romantically entangled with some of his summoners in the past, but despite the air of heartbreak, Elba plays his character as cheerfully indefatigable.

Read: An existential film about the oddities of modern life

Miller renders each historical period in rich, saturated colors. Even with CGI embellishments, the film looks like a charming throwback to Hollywood’s straightforward epics, whose grand sets and brassy performances were enough to transport an audience to a different era. Some of the oddball humor in these vignettes lands thuddingly. (One particularly slapstick substory about a wastrel prince clangs against the setting’s romanticism.) The hotel scenes, however, are surprisingly delightful, such as when the djinn browses TV channels with bafflement or crowds entire rooms by growing to a colossal size.

The laughs and anecdotes shared in the hotel are enchanting, but Three Thousand Years of Longing lives and dies by its final mundane act, when the djinn and Alithea return to London and try to navigate their cosmic partnership in the larger modern world. This is where Miller’s screenplay, co-written by Augusta Gore, gets didactic, assessing the crushing foibles of contemporary existence. Thankfully, Elba and Swinton convey such a human bond that the story stays exciting even as the message gets more bold-faced. That’s why Three Thousand Years of Longing succeeds: For all the film’s sprawling movements across history, the small-scale love story at its core is what makes it as arresting as Miller’s loudest hits.

Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn't quite fit into 108 minutes of storytelling

George miller's feverish creativity and romantic sincerity overwhelm idris elba and tilda swinton.

(from left) Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years Of Longing.

It’s hard not to root for a film like Three Thousand Years Of Longing . George Miller has long been one of our more adventuresome and tonally varied filmmakers, so his take on romantic fantasy is a tantalizing proposition, and the writer-director (with co-writer Augusta Gore) certainly doesn’t disappoint with his latest in terms of idiosyncrasies and compelling aesthetics. The film is so distinctly and uniquely its own thing that it’s tempting to praise it on that basis alone, to consider it elevated for the simple virtue of simply being itself. But Three Thousand Years Of Longing unfortunately undercuts its own effectiveness as a singular piece, presenting less as a unified vision of an auteur director than a scattershot assemblage of motifs, philosophies, and themes in search of a spine to hold them together.

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Three thousand years of longing, common sense media reviewers.

Gorgeous but talky fairy tale has sex, nudity, murder.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Several wisdoms are stated, but the clearest takea

Alithea is a smart, well-educated woman who's cont

Many Turkish characters (and actors) are portrayed

An assassination is depicted explicitly but withou

A character is forced into/locked in a room to hav

Characters express xenophobia. The insult "f--kfac

Character is kept drunk as a calming strategy.

Positive Messages

Several wisdoms are stated, but the clearest takeaway message is that if you love someone, set them free; if they're truly yours, they'll return to you.

Positive Role Models

Alithea is a smart, well-educated woman who's content with her life, but her search for love suggests that she isn't complete without it. In one story, a djinn expresses true love in terms of selflessness, and he sets the bar for measuring potential partners -- however, he's a fantasy figure.

Diverse Representations

Many Turkish characters (and actors) are portrayed, speaking their language. Black characters are powerful, including a genie who has taken the form of a man who shows sensitivity and expresses his emotions. The main character is a 61-year-old single woman who repeatedly expresses contentment with her life as it is, without a spouse or children, and confidently engages in romantic and sexual pursuits. Women are depicted as finding joy in intellectual pursuits and challenges. Body diversity in what is considered sexually appealing.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

An assassination is depicted explicitly but without extensive blood or gore. Battle scenes, including dead bodies strewn about. A war horse runs with a spear in its side. References to the actions and orders of a bloodthirsty leader. Creepy, mystical images. Marriage and sex are presented in ways that don't incorporate modern conceptions of consent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character is forced into/locked in a room to have sex with naked, voluptuous concubines, who are shown at length, from all angles, in positions that are intended to be alluring. A woman wears white clothes that become see-through when wet. Scenes of various couples having sex, including some sexual nudity from afar. Extensive conversation about romance and love is shown manifesting in various ways.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Characters express xenophobia. The insult "f--kface" is used.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy drama about storytelling. Based on A.S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," it uses the "three wishes" story device to explore the idea of humanity's "deepest desire." If you think that sounds like sex, you're not entirely wrong -- there are several sexual situations, though they're more about intercourse as a means to an end than explicit passion. And there's a lot of graphic nudity, particularly on the part of voluptuous concubines (portrayals that, on the upside, challenge modern Western beauty ideals). The movie takes place in Istanbul, and the stories are about the Turkish people, covering historical figures and eras from the Queen of Sheba to the Ottoman Empire. Violence includes war battles with wounded and dead humans and horses, plus assassinations that are harsh but not gory. Counter-stereotypical gender representations include a masculine genie ( Idris Elba ) who's sensitive and vulnerable and a single older woman ( Tilda Swinton ) who's happy with her solitary, child-free, intellectually stimulating life. There's one use of "f--k" for a laugh. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (2)
Kids say (3)

Based on 2 parent reviews

An Unflinching Observation of Human Love

For adults only, what's the story.

In THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING, Alithea ( Tilda Swinton ) is a scholar living a content life of solitude. While attending an academic conference in Istanbul, she finds a djinn ( Idris Elba ), who grants her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. The movie is adapted from A.S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye."

Is It Any Good?

The reason a film about the art of storytelling is needed is the same reason why this gorgeously shot historical epic can drag a bit. Direct, in-depth, meaningful conversation is frequently being lost in favor of messages delivered in quick bits and bites -- whether that's a clip on social media or fast edits in a film. People are impatient, and listening to long stories -- even when they're illustrated with beautiful and engaging action -- will be boring to some. When combined with the characters' formal way of speaking and occasional dips into ancient languages, it's a safe bet that you can count most teens out.

With Three Thousand Years of Longing , George Miller has created a fairy tale for adults. As the djinn tells tales of his past wish-grantees, the movie explores the sometimes intertwining notions of love and freedom. The djinn tells story after story of men and women who are trapped by circumstance but don't take the way out, even when it's offered. There are very few adults who don't know someone like that. Full of deep thoughts, depictions of all kinds of love, and explorations of how patriarchal environments are limiting to both women and men, Miller offers rich material for (yup) direct, in-depth, and meaningful conversations. While the perpetual narration might make you wish occasionally for the 1,000-year version, it's likely you'll be talking about this movie for months.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why versions of the "three wishes" story have been told over thousands of years. Is it always a cautionary tale? How does the idea play out in Three Thousand Years of Longing?

What makes someone a good storyteller? How do you keep a listener engaged? How does someone telling you a story differ from reading a book with pictures? And how does that differ from watching a story on the screen? Why is good communication an important life skill?

How does the film explore the idea of women operating powerfully from positions of powerlessness? What does this tell us about women's agency through history? What can we do to build and strengthen female voices?

If you had three wishes, how would you use them? What is your "deepest desire," and why do you want it?

Discuss all of the traditionally underrepresented groups you saw on screen here. Why is representation important?

Movie Details

In theaters : August 26, 2022
On DVD or streaming : November 15, 2022
Cast : Idris Elba , Tilda Swinton , Pia Thunderbolt
Director : George Miller
Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors
Studio : United Artists
Genre : Drama
Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Adventures , Book Characters
Character Strengths : Communication
Run time : 108 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence
Last updated : December 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’: A Delirious, And Occasionally Brilliant, Dream of Genie

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

On a trip to Istanbul for a conference, Alithea Binnie, a scholar of narrative and myth, finds herself swept up into a mythic story of her own. Alithea, played by Tilda Swinton , buys a bottle from an old shop, a cultural token for her travels, only to find that it is apparently home to a genie. One moment, she’s rinsing the bottle off in her hotel sink. The next, a giant Idris Elba , speaking another language and flowing with colorful undercurrents of fire and electricity beneath his skin, has set up shop in the bedroom.

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Something’s wrong, in a movie like this, when the prospect of yet another chapter, yet another drawling blip on the timeline of a multiple-thousands year long life like Djinn’s, doesn’t exactly feel exciting. Maybe it’s telling that the best moment in Three Thousand Years doesn’t come in one of Djinn’s stories, but after he’s done telling them, when we’ve returned to the broader frame. The moment comes as Alithea is headed back home, to London, with a genie in her carry-on that she cannot be sure will survive a bag inspection. The scene is genuinely suspenseful. What will metal detectors and other gizmos do to an ancient, god-like being born of electricity and myth? And what of the suspicious looks from airport security, the palpable hunch, visible on their faces, that Alithea has something foreign, or dangerous, or both in tow?

In the end, Three Thousand Years of Longing reveals itself to be about a set of problems, of political sympathies, that are downplayed for much of the movie but intriguingly apt once they’re made explicit. Yet what the movie has to say about modern attitudes toward the “other,” about the gaps that storytelling cannot bridge, rings out with less power than the practical problems its set up for this wise genie and his new friend. If the film is moving, it’s because of the impulses that spur Alithea to bring Djinn home and the double-edged facts of Djinn’s nature that prevent him from thriving there. The difficulty with Three Thousand Years is the film’s too-long road to getting there . Its real worth rests in how much it has to say once it finally does.

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Three Thousand Years Of Longing Review

02 Sep 2022

Three Thousand Years Of Longing

Whether he’s spinning a tale of all-female rebellion in Mad Max: Fury Road , or drawing a prized porker into an urban animal underworld in Babe: Pig In The City , George Miller ’s narratives often reveal themselves to be something unexpected, under the veneer of something familiar. In Three Thousand Years Of Longing , the filmmaker’s storytelling sensibilities are given a sprawling, colourful canvas upon which to weave an eccentric love story of epic proportions. It’s a film that wears its heart on its sleeve; a love letter to storytelling, itself based on a short story by the Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt. Told in the present day, it pivots between Tilda Swinton ’s narratology-loving narrator and Idris Elba ’s immortal, pointy-eared Djinn. She reflects on her experience of him; he recounts stories from his life in servitude.

Their paths align when Alithea (Swinton) — a solitary personality whose husband left her for another woman — picks out a blue-and-white glass bottle, in which the Djinn is captured, during her visit to Turkey. An electric-toothbrush-powered deep-clean of the artefact unleashes his giant form into her hotel room, after which Alithea’s guardedness, paired with her knowledge of fantastical beings and their ability to deceive, provokes the Djinn to open up, in the hope that he will eventually convince her to grant him freedom.

Elba deploys both charm and vulnerability in droves as the Djinn.

Each subsequent segment is a contained, opulent fairy tale: the Djinn having his heart stomped on by the Queen of Sheba after Solomon arrives on the scene; scheming sultans and concubines in the Ottoman era; a beguiling, enslaved bride in the 19th century who craves endless knowledge while shackled to her marriage. In each chapter, the Djinn can’t resist going beyond his duties, as desire or desperation (or both) inevitably lead him back into captivity. Back in the present day, the situation with Alithea proves harder to read, as her untrusting nature keeps him at arm’s length.

Swinton, ever the chameleon, leans into the dress-up-box aspect of her character, conveying a primness and wariness from under her sharp, ginger bob while deploying a Northern twang which may feel familiar to those who have seen her as the samurai-sword-wielding Scot in The Dead Don’t Die or her dystopian, bespectacled second-in-command in Snowpiercer . Elba, meanwhile, deploys both charm and vulnerability in droves as the Djinn. It’s a great role for him, seeing him move into refreshing new terrain as a wounded soul whose hope in humanity, although bashed, remains endlessly intact. As an actor whose masculinity is often mined for action or comedy (or Macavity in Cats , which exists in a category all of its own), it’s enjoyable to see him play the romantic lead with a silkier, more slowed-down temperament than what he’s used to bringing to the screen, even if the chemistry between the two leads is sometimes smothered by the theatricality of Swinton’s character.

The film is, admittedly, sometimes hampered by its visual effects. The Djinn’s stories are filled with intricate, green-screen-generated set-pieces made up of jewel-bright palettes and CG vistas of faraway lands. With Mad Max: Fury Road ’s cinematographer, John Seale, behind the camera, these sequences sometimes fall on the wrong side of excessive; your mileage may vary on whether that oversaturated approach will improve upon, or distract from, Elba’s narration.

Yet Miller’s imagination keeps Three Thousand Years Of Longing engaging. It’s a relentlessly kinetic film that zips between millennia with boundless eccentricity and verve. In the Djinn’s world, there are men who explode into waves of spiders, musical instruments that turn into living organisms as they’re played, and an ensemble of concubines languishing against the plush interiors of a Turkish palace. It may not always translate into the kind of visual masterpiece that Fury Road became, but it’s a spectacle nonetheless, one with idiosyncratic appeal and undeniable ambition.

Movies | 22 05 2022

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“Three Thousand Years of Longing” and the Perils of Unworldliness

By Anthony Lane

An illustration of Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba

How you become a genie is anyone’s guess. Maybe you get a MacArthur Genie Grant or something. What matters is that, once you’re in the job, you’re there for life, although be warned: that life may not be as freewheeling as you’d like. The opening statement of Robin Williams’s genie, in “Aladdin” (1992), tells of a painful detention. “Ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck!” he cries, sprung at last from his lamp.

Time is of the essence in George Miller’s new movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” and the essence is kept in a bottle, which is found in a Turkish bazaar by Alithea (Tilda Swinton). Her name is derived from the Greek for “truth”—a quiet joke, given the tallness of the tales that she prefers. Brisk and bobbed, neither a wife nor a mother, she lives in London but is currently in Istanbul, delivering a lecture on “Adventures in Narratology.” (That could be an alternative title for the film.) The vessel, unstoppered in her hotel bathroom, releases a djinn (Idris Elba), who has a soothing manner and pointed ears, one of which has had a bite taken out of it, perhaps in a magical catfight. His lower limbs, like Pan’s, are goatishly hirsute.

This is Miller’s first film since “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), which sucked the breath from the lungs of innumerable viewers and struck them as the very definition of an action flick. So confidently did it hare along, with each perilous incident and every change of landscape jacking up the momentum, that Miller’s decision to do things differently in “Three Thousand Years of Longing” feels proudly perverse. The movie, though a frantic treat for the retina, is also oddly inactive. Alithea stays in her room in Istanbul, orders breakfast, listens to the djinn recounting the highlights of his existence, and later bears him back to London in another bottle. That’s it. What happens is that almost nothing happens.

The highlights are all historical flashbacks. The first, replete with famous names, finds the djinn making nice to the Queen of Sheba, only to be usurped by the arrival of Solomon, if you please. (Solomon’s selling point is not his wisdom, which seems minimal, but a special self-playing musical instrument, with tiny twanging hands.) The next port of call is the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, where a sinister slugabed retires to a lair hung with sable fur and cultivates a harem; so generously proportioned are its inhabitants that Lucian Freud would have taken one look and sent out for more paint. Finally, we swoop onward through the Ottoman Empire, to the djinn’s encounter with a scholarly loner—a proto-Alithea, so to speak—who spends her days immured in a tower, in Istanbul, exploring the wilder shores of human knowledge.

Notice how much of this mythmaking is concerned with size—with the swell and contraction of physical forms. Miller has always been drawn to elasticity. The main baddie in “Mad Max: Fury Road” was a humongously toadish brute, and, as “The Witches of Eastwick” (1987) reached its climax, Jack Nicholson turned into an ogre, his gargantuan features framed in a kitchen window, and then into the merest mini-head, which popped like a bubble into nothingness. In short, we should not be taken aback by the djinn as he erupts from his flask into Alithea’s suite. His hand alone is enough to fill a room, and my favorite shot shows his wandering finger, as big as a canoe, brushing against the keyboard of a laptop, which, with a soft pdoing , powers up.

The echo here is of an enormous foot, complete with curved toenails, which descended upon, and threatened to squash, an Aladdin-like boy on a beach. The foot belonged to another giant genie, in “The Thief of Bagdad” (1940). As with the 1924 film of the same name, which starred Douglas Fairbanks at his most merrily bodacious, we were invited to gorge upon Orientalist exotica; Miller follows the same recipe, adding a pinch of erotica, and heaped spoonfuls of C.G.I. Where he departs from custom is in his approach to the granting of wishes. Alithea, an expert in the field, is wary. On the principle that “there’s no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale,” she initially refuses to place her order, to the disquiet of the djinn. You can see him thinking, Just my luck to get tenured to an academic. And you can see her thinking, as she calmly considers the djinn through her spectacles, What if what I want from him is him?

The back-and-forth between Swinton and Elba has a reflective tenderness. It is unusual, and gratifying, that a saga so richly arrayed with wonders should revolve around two characters who decline to be amazed, and that the gulf between mistress and servant, as demanded by legend, should be open for affectionate bridging. If only that touch of normality had been allowed to spread further through the film. As it is, this lovely and lolling work is dulled by unworldliness. Far too much attention is lavished on the never-never lands of Eastern reverie, and when we are spirited to modern realms, toward the end, implausibility reigns; no lecturer would dwell in a house as grand as Alithea’s London residence, and her elderly xenophobic neighbors are a distracting cartoon. Three thousand years, to be honest, means an awful lot of longing. How about a fairy tale lasting three weeks, with wishes being granted—or blocked—on WhatsApp, and a genie who bursts, in a sugar-free spray, from a can of Diet Coke?

It seems only fitting that “The Good Boss,” a new movie from Fernando León de Aranoa, should star Javier Bardem in the title role. So much of Bardem’s career, after all, has been spent in the enticing portrayal of power-mongers. Consider the sadists with unorthodox coiffures in “No Country for Old Men” (2007), “Skyfall” (2012), and “The Counselor” (2013). Think of the parts that Bardem played last year—the expansive Desi Arnaz, lording it over a broadcasting fiefdom in “Being the Ricardos,” and the sapphire-eyed chief of the Frenemy tribe, or whatever it was called, in “Dune.” Bardem has confessed that, in the sequel to the latter, he would very much like to ride a giant sandworm. Wouldn’t we all?

The boss in the new film is Julio Blanco. He runs a firm that he inherited from his father, in a Spanish town—the kind of place where he can make a phone call to a newspaper editor, or somebody with legal clout, and try to get a favor done or a problem fixed. The company manufactures scales, finely tooled for symbolic intent: everything from precision instruments to a hulking contraption for weighing livestock, upon which Blanco invites female interns and visitors to step. Most amusing.

No surprise, perhaps, that the plot should turn on the crux of work-life balance. Blanco is married and childless, but his paternalistic brag is that the company is his family. He is concerned, for instance, that Miralles (Manolo Solo), his right-hand man, keeps making professional errors: a slackness caused, as Blanco learns, by the age-old pressure of cuckoldry. Another worker, recently fired, sets up a personal protest camp in front of the firm’s factory, thus earning the sympathy of the security guard. A third has a tearaway son, whom we first see engaged in an act of violence; Blanco kindly sets him on a more respectable path, only to avail himself, much later, of the lad’s reliable knack for thuggery.

The film is littered with such ironic reversals, and with decent intentions that lurch into disarray. No motive goes unmixed. What appeals to León de Aranoa, I reckon, is the necessary comedy of comeuppance—neither savage nor raucous but carefully agonized, and never more apparent than when Blanco contrives to seduce a new intern, Liliana (Almudena Amor), only for his scheming to snap back in his face. Piece by piece, what he thinks of as his entitlements (not that he has ever thought about them that much) begin to fall apart. Liliana outsmarts him, deliciously, and there’s a devastating moment at which Khaled (Tarik Rmili), the head of logistics and the company’s most efficient operator, says to Blanco, “Don’t give me any of that family crap. Look at my skin. I’m not your son.”

“The Good Boss” pulls more weight than you’d expect, and Bardem is in charge of the pulling. Here is one of his most packed performances—often funny, yet never engineered for laughs alone, and persuasive in its portrait of an essentially weak soul who persists in dreaming of strength. Though anything but innocent, Blanco is no monster; instead, he’s a kind of lost jerk. Social embarrassment leaves him unmanned and close to collapse (not least when he and his wife host a dinner for Liliana and her parents), and when a woman in a supermarket gives him a well-earned slap, in payment for his presumption, he suddenly looks aged and dishevelled, tenderly working his frail jaw. In closeup, on the other hand, he acquires a glaze of true creepiness, especially when cruising in his car, and any seasoned Bardem watcher will be reminded of villains past. Make sure to keep your seat for the mysterious poise of the movie’s final shot: Is it, or is it not, a prelude to murder? The scales tremble. They do not tip. ♦

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COMMENTS

Three Thousand Years of Longing movie review (2022)
Love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word, emotions.". "Three Thousand Years of Longing," the new film directed by the protean "Mad Max: Fury Road" creator George Miller, is very much a battleground. And very much about the emotion tagged in the title. In the case of Alithea, the academic played with traits both prim and feisty ...
Three Thousand Years of Longing
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Three Thousand Years of Longing Review ... But in the meantime, Swinton and Elba display a beautiful back and forth as the Djinn reveals his 3,000-year tale of betrayal, lost love, and a djinn who ...
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The laughs and anecdotes shared in the hotel are enchanting, but Three Thousand Years of Longing lives and dies by its final mundane act, when the djinn and Alithea return to London and try to ...
A Review Of George Miller's Three Thousand Years Of Longing
A lonely scholar, on a trip to Istanbul, discovers a Djinn who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. Those taken in by the frenetic tone of the film's marketing may be surprised ...
Three Thousand Years of Longing Movie Review
For adults only. This amazing movie was directed by George Miller who is best known for Mad Max. Some of you may have also seen one of his earlier stories, Lorenzo's Oil ( A true story, which this is not). 3000 Years of Longing is an R rated fairy-tale full of the violence of history, with plenty of nudity and sex.
Three Thousand Years of Longing review: George Miller dreams of genie
Cannes review: George Miller dips into romantic fantasy with. Three Thousand Years of Longing. He dreams of genie. A man cannot live on Thunderdomes alone, apparently. Somewhere between the ...
'Three Thousand Years of Longing': A Delirious, And Occasionally
In 'Three Thousand Years of Longing,' Tilda Swinton frees Idris Elba from the bottle, beginning a sweeping tale that spans centuries of lost loves and delves into the hidden power of romance.
Three Thousand Years Of Longing Review
Tilda Swinton. George Miller. During a work trip to Istanbul, narratology scholar Alithea Binnie (Swinton) accidentally unleashes a Djinn (Elba). In a bid to earn her trust, the Djinn begins to ...
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Oct 30, 2023. Three Thousand Years of Longing might have been one of the cult movies of fairy tale cinema, but unfortunately, it missed the opportunity due to the slow pace and poor workmanship in the Turkish parts. It's not about the director that George Miller, who did a great job in the Sheba part, did a lousy job when it came to Ottoman.
"Three Thousand Years of Longing" and "The Good Boss," Reviewed
Anthony Lane reviews George Miller's fantasy film "Three Thousand Years of Longing," starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, and Fernando León de Aranoa's corporate satire "The Good Boss ...
Review: '3000 Years of Longing' Beautiful, but Incomplete
About Matthew Lickona. September 3, 2022 6:30 AM. The world George Miller creates is impressive, but his message is lacking. A t the screening I attended for 3000 Years of Longing, director and co ...
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Three Thousand Years of Longing is a 2022 fantasy romantic drama film directed and produced by George Miller.Written by Miller and Augusta Gore, it is based on the 1994 short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A. S. Byatt and follows a djinn who is unleashed from a bottle by a professor (Tilda Swinton) and tells her stories from his thousands of years of existence.

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: George Miller’s Wishy-Washy Fantasy Has Serious Story Problems

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Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of competition), May 20, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 108 MIN.

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The Whimsical, Intellectual Chemistry of Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton

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