Movie Review: 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' and Your Heart's Desire

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Augusta Gore

Starring Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba

Release Date August 26th, 2022

I wish to be in love. I wish to love and be loved. This is not to say I have never been in love or felt the comfort that comes with being loved. I have felt loved all my life by parents, lovers, and friends. On that front, I’ve been lucky. No, my wish is simply to be in love, to feel romance and desire, the excitement of discovery, and that feeling that can only come when two people pledge to only love each other. Marriage? Not necessarily, though I am not opposed to the idea.

I wish I could tell someone that I love them and they tell me that they love me, in the romantic sense of love, and that I was capable of believing it, embracing it, trusting it to be true. I wish for the kind of certainty of love and romance that, realistically, doesn’t exist in any tangible sense. For me, to love is to trust, to invest who you really are in another person and for them to do in kind. That’s love, it’s a foundation of trust, of wholehearted faith.

I wish to banish insecurity inside the security of loving and being loved. Insecurity has been the bane of my existence. I have a level of insecurity that has defined me for as long as I can remember. That insecurity has short circuited the great loves of my life. That snaky, poisonous, toxic and deadly insecurity has acted as the voice in my head for most of my life, especially when it comes to the idea that I can be loved, again, in the romantic sense. If you’re my family and you are reading this, I am secure in how you love me.

If I had a Djinn and could wish for my heart's desire, it would be to defeat and destroy my insecurity. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to feel everything with certainty, you have to be careful what you wish for. Specificity is your friend when it comes to Djinns, or Genies or tricksters. As Tilda Swinton’s character Alithea notes in the new George Miller movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing, our literature is littered with cautionary tales about wishes and the unintended consequences of getting what you want.

Alithea is particularly of a mind to understand the dichotomy of wishing. Alithea is a Narratologist. She has dedicated her life to studying stories and how they reflect and relate to our history and humanity, our psychology and our wellbeing. She’s read, if not all of the legendary tales about the nature of wishes, more than most of us have. Thus, Alithea is uniquely positioned to handle herself when confronted with an actual Djinn, one portrayed by the extraordinary Idris ‘Lion Puncher’ Elba.

On a work trip to Istanbul Alithea finds a strange and oddly beautiful piece of blown glass. It’s damaged, it’s cracked and perhaps been caught in a fire at some point, but it has retained a beauty that she is drawn to. Upon taking the piece back to her hotel, Alithea decides to try and clean it up. In doing so she unlocks the detachable cap at the top and a being of light emerges in electro-static and emerges in the living area outside of her hotel bathroom.

While she tries to reconcile this as her overactive imagination, the Djinn is surely real and aims to convince her to free him by making three wishes. If she makes three wishes he will be freed to go to the realm of the Djinn for an eternity among his people. If she refuses, he may fade into a ghostly realm, unseen and unheard, and doomed to roam for eternity, watching the world go by, longing forever for release.

In order to convince Alithea to make her wishes, the Djinn indulges her love of storytelling. The Djinn weaves the tale of how he came to be captured in a bottle thousands of years ago. Another tale of how he was released and then recaptured, and one final tale where the Djinn found his heart’s desire only to lose it in an unimaginable fashion, a bit of chance so uncommonly heartbreaking I can’t begin to describe it, you will have to see it for yourself.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a tad unwieldy, a little rushed and pushy, but it’s also wildly imaginative, romantic and entertaining. In Tllda Swinton and Idris Elba, director George Miller has found a remarkable pair. The chemistry between Swinton and Elba may not seem obvious at first glance but as it unfolds in Three Thousand Years of Longing, it’s undeniable. These are two actors on their own unique and remarkable wavelength.

That uncommon and unexpected chemistry is the secret weapon of Three Thousand Years of Longing. It’s what makes the visual flights of fancy and the at times obtuse storytelling fully forgivable because always wind up back with Swinton and Elba and their extraordinary bond. I adore these two actors and through them I fell in love with these characters and their strange love story, such as it is.

Obviously, because I really enjoyed this movie, I am not going to tell you whether or not Alithea makes her three wishes or not. It’s not so much about spoilers, you can’t spoil this movie per se, rather, it’s a journey of a movie and a journey you are best to take for yourself with only my humble description and recommendation. This film placed me in the mind of what I would wish for, what is my heart’s desire and that’s been quite exciting to explore thanks to Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is in theaters now. You can find my archive of more than 20 years and nearly 2000 movie reviews online now at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at PodcastSean and follow the archive blog at SeanattheMovies, And you can hear me talk about movies on the Everyone’s A Critic Movie review Podcast on your favorite podcasting app.