Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist. That means she studies the purpose of stories in relation to human history and culture. She travels to Istanbul to speak at a conference and comes across a blue glass bottle at one of the local shops she visits to purchase a souvenir. Alithea takes the bottle back to her hotel room, where she accidentally allows the cap to fall off and suddenly, a Djinn (Idris Elba) appears. He tells Alithea that he will now grant her three wishes, but she knows that a Djinn, according to tradition, is a trickster. In an attempt to prove his innocence, Djinn recounts the story of his life, the wishes he has granted, and his imprisonment in various bottles throughout time. Tales of the Djinn appear as early as the time of the Queen of Sheba and continue to the present day.

In order for Three Thousand Years of Longing to work as a mind-bending, fantastical ode to love in all its many forms, that passion has to translate to the audience. Sure, director George Miller can take us through Djinn’s three-thousand-years-long journey to meet Alithea and explain that each of his imprisonments was because of love, but it’s just too hard to believe when the film is so restrained. For all the oddity and intensity Miller managed to capture in Mad Max: Fury Road, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels extremely run-of-the-mill and ordinary. It’s an unexpected problem, given the fantastical nature of the movie’s journey, but an essential element is missing.

Perhaps the title of the film is in part to blame for this empty feeling. The word “longing” conjures up the likes of Jane Austen adaptations by Joe Wright. A visceral tug on the heartstrings or flex of the hand. “Longing” implies that the audience is going to physically feel their hearts ache, as though they are the ones yearning for a love that’s been waiting for three thousand years.

And yet, Three Thousand Years of Longing does not deliver on that promise of gut-punch emotions. Instead, it focuses more of its time on vignettes of Djinn’s long, eternal life on earth. On the one hand, it’s hard to fault a movie that’s earnest in its desire to really dig into the “why” of storytelling and the always-present need of humans to document their existence. The other side of the coin, though, is hefty exposition from Djinn to Alithea, a character we barely know anything about. Djinn encourages her to make three wishes for what she truly and deeply desires, but Alithea is not established enough in her own right for these needs to be known or inferred. Swinton is as delightfully odd as she always is, but she’s simply not given the chance to fully explore what it is that Alithea wants.

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. It’s a burden all stories must carry, but the emotions the audience feels vary based on the story itself. The only way to truly fail in the pursuit and art of narrative form is to fail to stir anything at all. Unfortunately, that’s the case for Three Thousand Years of Longing.

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