Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

George Miller, a director who once sent a talking pig to the city and now sends a djinn to a hotel room in Istanbul, has adapted A. S. Byatt's short story with the patience of a man convinced that what the world needs is two hours of conversation between a large purple spirit and a British academic. Tilda Swinton plays Alithea, a narratology scholar who prizes her solitude and has never wanted children. Idris Elba plays the Djinn, who has spent three thousand years in a bottle and would like a few more minutes to explain why. The film is talky, literary, and largely indifferent to the trends of its moment.

That indifference deserves a closer look. The central romance crosses racial lines and the film treats this as unremarkable, which is either admirable restraint or a refusal to engage. The supporting cast wanders through Turkish, Ugandan, and disabled performers without commentary. Alithea's independence gets a hearing, though the film never argues for it. A sultan's favorite concubine, called Sugar Lump, is a large-bodied woman presented as desirable, and the film lets that stand. Alithea also hallucinates demons, treated as a quirk of an overactive imagination, not a condition. The historical figures, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and Suleiman among them, are reinvented freely, but as myth, not as argument.

The absences are instructive. No queer thread, no climate anxiety, no class grievance. The djinn's weakness comes from cell towers, not carbon. The lecturing is real but literary: Alithea discourses on stories and wishes, and the sermon concerns narrative, not society. It is a handsome, strange, unprofitable object, and the box office was not kind to it. Miller has made a film out of step with its era, and seems entirely at peace with that.