Review: 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' puts Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in an intriguing but claustrophobic story

Two great actors, a director who never seems to put a foot wrong, and a story brimming with visual possibilities — so why is “Three Thousand Years of Longing” not quite the slam-dunk it should be?

The protagonist here is Alithea Binnie, played by Tilda Swinton. She’s a narratologist, a scholar of storytelling, and it’s safe to say she’s heard them all — which may be why she’s unimpressed with notions of romantic tales. She lives alone, as she tells the audience in the somewhat overdone narration, and she once had a husband. She’s content with her books and her studies, and traveling to conferences to meet academics like herself.

While attending such a conference in Istanbul, she goes shopping in one shop, and encounters an unusual glass bottle — blue and white stripes, and quite beautiful as found objects go. But when she gets to her hotel room and tries to unstick the stopper, something escapes the bottle: A djinn, or a genie, played by Idris Elba.

After sorting out the language barrier — the djinn has been in that bottle for centuries — he offers Alithea what most djinns offer to people who free them from bottles: Three wishes. There are some limits, like not wishing for extra wishes or wishing to be immortal, but otherwise the djinn’s purpose is to give Alithea whatever her heart desires.

Alithea isn’t going for it, though. She has studied all the stories about wishes, and she knows that they always are cautionary tales about wishes that go badly. (Heck, anybody who watches a season of “Fairly OddParents” knows that.) Alithea’s refusal to play along frustrates the djinn, who tries to prove his sincerity and his need to grant wishes by telling stories of his experiences as a wish-granting genie.

It’s in these stories where director George Miller — the man who made the “Mad Max” movies — really shines. After being cooped up in Alithea’s Istanbul hotel room for a fair stretch of the movie, it’s a relief to travel ancient lands with this djinn, who describes falling in love with the Queen of Sheba, trying to help another court’s concubine (Megan Gale), and other instances where his devotion sometimes overrode his good sense.

Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore (adapting a short story by A.S. Byatt) have their biggest problems balancing the claustrophobia of the scenes in Alithea’s hotel and the ornate palaces of the djinn’s stories. Even Swinton’s Alithea seems to buckle from the tight quarters, as she finally reveals a wish that upends the entire movie and guarantees a melancholy ending no matter how things work out.

Watching Swinton and Elba banter for the hour before that radical storytelling shift is worth it, no matter what the movie throws at us after the fact. Their back-and-forth — between the all-powerful begging to be of use and the story expert whose lifetime of contentment leaves little room for life-changing wishes — is delicious, and gives “Three Thousand Years of Longing” the bite it needs.

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 26, in various theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence. Running time: 109 minutes.