You never know what to expect with George Miller. This is the director who, at age 70, disrupted the film industry with the audacious Mad Max: Fury Road. The fact that Miller is returning seven years later with a fantastical, lurid fairytale stretching across millennia is only a natural progression. Of course he would go as weird as it gets.
Set predominantly in an Istanbul hotel room, Three Thousand Years of Longing stars Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a narratologist who’s in town for a conference. At a local market, she finds herself drawn to a small blue bottle, and as she attempts to clean away its dirt with a toothbrush, she inadvertently releases a Djinn (Idris Elba) — one so enormous that his foot just barely squeezes through her bathroom door. He offers her three wishes, but Alithea, content with her loneliness, is perhaps the one person who doesn’t long for anything. That is until the Djinn regales her with tales of his bottled incarcerations: his tragic affair with the Queen of Sheba, a long stint spent in a Constantinople palace, and his attachment to an imprisoned wife thirsty for knowledge.
