Three Thousand Years of Longing Review: An Awe-Inspiring Ode to Storytelling

“Storytelling” has become a ubiquitous buzzword in Hollywood, at least of late, used by industry creatives and their public relations arms to tout the importance and value of a film or television show. Hollywood has, of course, always been in the business of telling stories. But in a cinematic landscape now overpopulated by prequels, sequels, and suffocatingly bloated cinematic universes, self-professed storytellers often seem to over-emphasize the importance of narrative as a means of masking a dearth of originality, both in the actual stories being told and the images being used to tell them.

That partly explains why George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like such a breath of fresh air, as the film not only cleverly examines the very nature of storytelling, it clearly understands that, in the movies, the act of image-making is inextricable from that of storytelling. Written by Miller and Augusta Gore, the film may fall short in achieving the emotional gravitas that it aims for, but its bursts of visual splendor are spectacularly vibrant, occasionally lurid, and full of a vitality that’s increasingly absent from big-budget Hollywood spectacles, which are often driven by rote narratives and let down by bland aesthetics.

For all its grandiosity, Three Thousand Years of Longing starts out as an intimate character study. Alithea (Tilda Swinton) is a lonesome scholar and narratologist, with a particular interest in what stories have in common and how they make our “bewildering existence” more bearable. Alithea posits that ancient myths and creation stories have been replaced by scientific narratives, and that this has, in part, led to a diminishment of our collective sense of wonder. Despite her appreciation of the power of storytelling, Alithea approaches the craft of storytelling in a detached, wholly academic manner. She’s a great admirer of stories but seems completely severed from their very lifeblood—the wonder that they can spark.

One day, Alithea buys an old bottle at a store in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, unaware that a djinn (Idris Elba) has been trapped inside of it for 3,000 years. Then, after opening the bottle, she accidentally releases the djinn, who insistently offers her three wishes. Given her familiarity with folklore, the unadventurous Alithea is aware of the hidden pitfalls of taking up such offers and tells the djinn that she’s not interested in asking him for anything. Three Thousand Years of Longing then proceeds as a two-hander, with Alithea and the djinn discussing the roles of storytelling in people’s lives and the djinn sharing three separate stories, each brimming with mythological references, of his time in the ancient world searching for a woman whose wishes he can grant and thus be permanently freed from his duties.

Regaling Alithea with intoxicating tales of love, betrayal, jealousy, and greed, the djinn transports Alithea from the cramped hotel room that they’re in to ostentatious palaces, stone dungeons, and blood-soaked desert battlefields. While the CGI in these flashback episodes leaves something to be desired, the filmmakers’ rendering of an ancient Middle East populated by bizarre mythical creatures, and where castle intrigue, ribaldry, and love affairs aren’t in short supply, remains awe-inspiring in its breadth of scope and imaginativeness.

In shifting back and forth between a bland, modern hotel room and the elaborate dreamscapes that the djinn paints for Alithea, Three Thousand Years of Longing mirrors the long-time battle that Alithea mentions early on between scientifically verifiable historical facts and the more passion-inducing myths that have been passed down for centuries. Both the film and the djinn embrace the sense of wonder and amazement that such elaborate tales can awaken in us, and their ability to transport even someone as staunchly reserved and resistant as Alithea.

That the djinn’s stories cause Alithea to take stock of her life isn’t as important as the fact that it’s the mere act of storytelling that’s caused the pair to gradually grow closer to one another. If Three Thousand Years of Longing’s shift into an outright romance in the final act feels a bit hasty, even borderline treacly, it’s mostly mitigated by the unsurprisingly terrific work of Swinton and Elba, who effortlessly evoke the reticent yearning and blossoming emotions of two beings who’ve long grown used to being alone. Through their connection, the filmmakers assert their belief that not only can stories be beautiful and extraordinary, but also the means of bridging the gulf between people who would otherwise be strangers to one another.