108 min | R | August 26, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
A scholar of stories meets a Djinn who offers her three wishes. She knows every cautionary tale about what wishes cost, so she refuses to make one. The standoff is more interesting than the resolution.
Alithea Binnie studies narrative for a living. She travels to Istanbul, buys an old glass bottle, and releases a Djinn who has been trapped for centuries. He offers her three wishes. She refuses, because she knows that every story about wishes ends in ruin and she has built a career on understanding why. George Miller frames the whole film around this negotiation between a woman who trusts no story and a creature who needs her to believe in one.
Tilda Swinton plays Alithea with a guarded composure that the film slowly pries open. She delivers her refusals like a professor closing an argument. Idris Elba plays the Djinn as a being exhausted by his own history, and he tells his three failed escapes as confessions rather than seductions. The two actors spend most of the film sitting in hotel bathrobes and talking, and the chemistry holds because each treats the other as a genuine intellectual threat. Aamito Lagum appears as the Queen of Sheba in the Djinn’s first tale, draped in gold and indifference, anchoring the most opulent of the flashbacks.
Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore adapt A.S. Byatt’s short story into a film of nested fables. Miller stages the Djinn’s memories with saturated color and digital excess, piling silk and smoke and fire into frames that deliberately overwhelm. The contrast is the strategy. The flashbacks burn with maximalist spectacle while the present-day scenes sit in flat, quiet hotel light. That visual split states the film’s thesis before the dialogue does, because the past is where the longing lives and the present is where Alithea has to decide whether to risk it.
The film is a beautiful argument that does not fully become a story. The tales the Djinn tells are richer than the frame that contains them. When the movie shifts from debate to romance in its final act, the emotional temperature stays cool, and the central relationship asks for a warmth the film never quite generates. Miller builds a gorgeous machine about the necessity of belief and then watches it run a little cold. The ideas are alive even when the feeling is not.