Film / Three Thousand Years of Longing

"We all have desires, even if they remain hidden from us. But it is your story, and I cannot wait to see where it goes."

— Djinn

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy film co-written and directed by Mad Max creator George Miller, based on the titular short story of the anthology “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, and starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

Literary scholar Alithea Binnie (Swinton) goes to an academic conference in İstanbul and purchases an antique flask as a souvenir. Upon opening it, she releases a genie (Elba) who will grant her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. As she's fairly content with her life, she doesn't know what to wish for, and so the genie proceeds to instruct her, through stories of his own experience, on the nature of desire.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2022, and was released on August 31, 2022. The trailer can be seen here.

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This film provides examples of:

• Ambiguously Related: There is light implication that Alithea may be a descendant of the previous woman the Djinn fell in love with. They share similar physical tics and both are academics. And if the woman's child came from the Djinn, it would explain Alithea's visions (having the blood of a djinn, she can sense the supernatural).
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Alithea has visions of supernatural creatures visiting or menacing her before she even meets the Djinn. It's never revealed whether these are products of her overactive imagination or real.
  • It's ambiguous for much of the film whether the Djinn himself is a product of her imagination, though the very last scene where he kicks a soccer ball back to some kids implies that he is real, since he interacts with someone other than Alithea.
  • A more specific instance, Suleiman's guard that turns out to be a spirit similar to the Djinn and the airport agent are played by the same actor (with the same hairstyle even). Is it a cosmic coincidence, or is it the same spirit on the lookout for the Djinn? Especially considering he's the one who is the most insistent that Alithea have the bottle she brought with her scanned.
• And I Must Scream: The Djinn experiences this in two ways. The first way is being trapped inside a brass bottle and thrown into the sea. Alithea assumes he must have just had a really long sleep, but the Djinn assures her that Djinn do not sleep. He spent thousands of years trapped in the jar and awake and aware for every moment of it. The second variation occurs when the first woman to release him from his prison dies before she makes her final wish. This causes the Djinn to become incorporeal, existing in the world but unable to interact with it in any way. This state lasts until his bottle is found again a few hundred years later, though shortly after he ends up back in the bottle at the bottom of the sea again for another two hundred years.
• Anthology Film: The bulk of the film is a series of stories told to Alithea by the Djinn detailing his life experiences and interactions with his masters throughout history.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: The djinn's first story is set with the Queen of Sheba, whose kingdom is sometimes speculated to have been in southern Arabia. The rest of the narrative takes place in and around Istanbul at different points in time, with the section set in Suleiman's court particularly evoking this trope.
• Artistic License – History: The Safavid leader executed by Murad IV wears a mask resembling the famous "Mask of Sargon"◊, roughly 3,800 years too late.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The Djinn spends a large part of the movie naked, seeming to be his preferred state. However, his lower half is non-human and though it is never focused on, his groin is largely featureless.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Alithea lampshades that most stories about wishes are tales of caution. Indeed, many wishes do go badly for the djinn's masters, even though he means the best for them. Ultimately, however, things turn out alright for Alithea, whose life stays mostly the same with the added benefit of occasional visits from an immortal friend.
• Been There, Shaped History: As the title suggests, the djinn has lived for thousands of years, and his magic has interacted with various historical figures.
  • It was King Solomon (during his affair with the Queen of Sheba) who initially trapped him in a bottle.
  • The djinn was an observer at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent and directly got Prince Mustafa involved with a Beautiful Slave Girl.
• Benevolent Genie: The djinn is very friendly (to the point of often falling in love with his Always Female masters) and repeatedly insists that he's not a tricky djinn like the ones in Alithea's stories. However, that's partially because he can only obtain freedom by granting the three deepest desires of his master's heart, and he admits that he would likely go along with even an evil wish without a second thought to obtain his freedom.
• Berserk Button: The djinn does not react well to Alithea's notion not to make any wishes or to wish she'd never met him. Each triggers a traumatic experience from his past.
• Bookworm: Zefir, the djinn's master prior to Alithea, wishes for knowledge, which he gives her in the form of countless books; she pores through them all.
• Born Unlucky: While the Djinn does make mistakes, the bulk of his tragic personal situation is mostly caused by sheer bad luck.
• Color Motifs: The djinn generally wears red, black, and gold.
• Chubby Chaser: Prince Ibrahim Has a Type and is placated during his brother's reign with a harem of plus-sized concubines. He brings his ladies with him when he is named sultan, one of whom, Sugar Lump, he names governor of Damascus and is responsible for unearthing the djinn due to her weight breaking the stone tile he was hidden under when she fell. This is based on real stories told of "Ibrahim the Mad" and his preferences, though those may have been propaganda from his enemies.
• Circassian Beauty: We see several women in the Ottoman court. Gülten interacts with a few in the servants' baths, and they're all fair-skinned, dark-eyed beauties. The antagonist of her story, Hurrem (not Circassian herself and a redhead but a romanticized empress nonetheless) is Suleiman's favorite concubine and later wife, extolled as a great beauty with red hair and milky skin dressed to the nines in Ottoman fashion.
• Credits Gag: The fictional Shahrazad Airlines is thanked in the closing credits.
• Death of a Child: When Alithea flips through her scrapbook of her marriage, she reaches an ultrasound labeled as the "first and only" photo of Enzo. The scrapbook is empty after that, implying that Alithea suffered a miscarriage during pregnancy, and her marriage did not survive the grief.
• Decadent Court: Suleiman and his descendants, perhaps even more than in Real Life (though some of the stories of the Ottoman court are arguably worse than what is depicted here).
• Demon Head: The ghostly figure Alithea sees during her conference lecture sports one when he attacks her on-stage.
• Did Not Think This Through: All of the Djinn's masters make ill-thought out wishes with tragic consequences, despite his best intentions.
  • Gülten becomes obsessed with Prince Mustafa and wishes for him to be in love with her, and then to be pregnant with his child. This causes Hurrem to panic and have both killed.
  • Sugar Lump immediately assumes the Djinn is a Jackass Genie and traps him in his bottle, causing her to lose out on a wish and for him to be trapped. Also applies to the Djinn - when he appeared to her he was desperate with the nearness of freedom and rushed at her, shouting and demanding that she make a wish now. Unsurprisingly she didn't trust him.
  • Zefir's wishes for knowledge and to see the world as a Djinn sees cause quite a bit of Sanity Slippage, until eventually, between her stress and the Djinn's refusal to grant her third wish, she wishes to forget him in the spur of the moment, costing her the knowledge she gained from the first two wishes.
  • Alithea wishes for the Djinn to love her and takes him home with her. However, the intense electromagnetic radiation of the modern world messes with his physiology to the point that he's dying simply from being in England.
• Disease Bleach: One of the first signs that the djinn's time in the modern mortal world is having a negative effect on him is the bright red patch in his beard turning gray.
• Energy Being: Djinn being made of smokeless fire is interpreted by the film as them being made of electromagnetic forces like humans are made of matter. This becomes a plot point as they're always conscious of the electromagnetic transmissions of the modern world, and the intensity of this would eventually kill any that remain on Earth too long.
• External Retcon: Alithea points out that all the famous tellings of the legend have the Queen of Sheba traveling to meet King Solomon, but the Djinn tells her it was actually the other way around.
• Failed a Spot Check: Alithea is so enamored with the Djinn during the film's third act that she completely misses the signs of the Djinn's ill health until it's almost too late.
• Fan Disservice: Prince Ibrahim's concubines.
• A Fate Worse Than Death: First when the Djinn is trapped in the bottle, then later when he is made imperceptible for not granting three wishes before his master's death.
• Foreshadowing: Sheba gulps after watching the musical performance of Solomon, indicating that she's falling for him. Later, Alithea gulps while listening to the Djinn's tales, again indicating that she's going to fall in love with him.
• Framing Device: While the circumstances of Alithea finding the Djinn and the film's third act of her trying to live with the Djinn constitute stories in and of themselves, the bulk of the film is simply Alithea and the Djinn in her hotel room, with the Djinn telling her stories from his past, occasionally broken up by brief discussions between the two.
• Freeing the Genie: Alithea attempts this, being both wholly content with her life and wary of being tricked by a potential Jackass Genie. Djinn wishes don't work that way here and he can only be free if he grants her heart's desire through three wishes, but their story ultimately ends in a more symbolic version of this, with her last wish being to let the djinn be free of his commitment to love her from her first wish.
• Genie in a Bottle: The djinn is imprisoned in a blue-and-white flask, though the bottle is not his natural state. After having three wishes granted, instead of returning to the bottle, he'd be able to return to his home plane of existence, something he very much wishes to do. It's not his first bottle, and the story of how it was made is particularly tragic.
• Genre Savvy: Alithea is a mythologist, and is thus is far too aware of stories of a Literal Genie or Jackass Genie to make any sort of wish with blind haste; she even accuses the genie of being a "Trickster".
• Grail in the Garbage: Alithea finds the flask containing the djinn tucked away in a pile of worthless bottles in an Istanbul shop. She is instantly drawn to it and takes it home even if the shopkeeper tries to guide her towards more valuable wares.
• Hairy Girl: As mentioned (or interpreted) from some ancient texts, the Queen of Sheba has hairy legs... though her leg hairs are long, almost like a horse's mane. The djinn states that this is a sign of a human with djinn heritage; Murad is later seen sporting this trait as well.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Queen of Sheba is said to have been half-djinn, as humans and Djinni can procreate, with furry legs being a sign of this heritage.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: King Solomon gets hit with this big time. While most sources portray Solomon as a mostly benevolent ruler, if a bit of a cad, in this film, he's a ruthless sorcerer who is the one who trapped the Djinn in his bottle in the first place since he didn't want him to interfere in his seduction of the Queen of Sheba.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The djinn starts out filling the full hotel room, and even when he shrinks down he towers a few feet above Alithea. This required some FX/camera tricks, as Tilda Swinton is quite tall in real life at 5'11, and Idris Elba is only a few inches taller than her.
• Humans Are Special: The djinn feels this way. He marvels at how humanity has advanced in his long life, and when Alithea suggests that the progress of science and engineering isn't anything special and is overshadowed by human cruelty, he suggests that there is much more to admire about a species who make meaning out of such short lives. Of course, him frequently falling deeply in love with human women might have something to do with that.
• I Should Write a Book About This: Unsurprisingly given her profession, the film opens with narration from Alithea stating that their experience will be more believable if told as a fairy tale and ends with her writing the story in a book.
• Imaginary Friend: Alithea created one named "Enzo" when she was a young girl in an orphanage to fill her loneliness. Creating his backstory helped inspire her lifelong love of stories, but she eventually became embarrassed by this sign of immaturity and burned the journals she wrote about him. This overactive imagination is one reason she remains doubtful of the djinn's actual existence for part of the movie.
• Informed Attractiveness: The Djinn states that Sheba was not just beautiful but "beauty itself."
• Jackass Genie: The djinn himself isn't one, but this trope is invoked when Ibrahim's concubine encounters him. Not helped by how desperate and insistent he is, shouting and grabbing at her the moment he appeared, she instantly thinks he's a malicious spirit and wishes him back in the bottle and at the bottom of the ocean. It's also implied that the whole "Jackass Genie" concept came from humans making selfish wishes without thinking of the potential consequences, then blaming the djinn when it all goes south.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: How the djinn wound up in the blue and white bottle; his last master, whom he loved dearly, was enraged that he wouldn't let her make her third wish because he didn't want her to leave him and they fought intermittently about it, with the djinn placating her by putting himself in a bottle each time. The last time, this led her to wish she could forget she had ever met him while the djinn was returning to his captive state. Whether she still retained any of the knowledge she accumulated from her first two wishes is unclear, but she clearly forgot that all of the books he gave her were contained in those bottles, as she never reopened his.
• Love Hungry:
  • The djinn's first master is a slave girl who falls for Mustafa, the eldest son of Suleiman the Magnificent, and uses her two wishes to get Mustafa to fall in love with her and to bear his child. This helps get Mustafa, herself, and her unborn child killed.
  • Alithea insists at first that she is not this and is happy with her life of solitude, but she soon falls for the djinn, especially the way he talks about the women in his past with such longing, and uses her first wish to ask him to love her. Even though the djinn tries gamely, she quickly realizes that it is impossible to compel someone to love you and uses her last wish to free him.
• Love Makes You Dumb:
  • The djinn's first master is motivated by love in her first two wishes, and the results are disastrous. Her lover's father becomes paranoid that his son will usurp him and has him executed, and the girl is so blinded by her devotion that she refuses to believe the djinn's warnings to use her last wish to flee until it is too late, resulting in the deaths of herself and her unborn child.
  • Alithea is a Genre Savvy academic, but her growing love for the djinn leads her to wish that he loves her in return. She is so enchanted by his presence that she mostly ignores the effects that the modern world has on his health until it is almost too late, but she snaps out of it just in time.
• The Magic Goes Away: On a more literary level, Alithea gives a speech in Istanbul about the nature of mythology, and how ancient religions and myths existed to give meaning to all the unknowns of the world, but such myths and beliefs drifted into history as science began to more concretely explain the world around us. More concretely, the Djinn and those like him cannot exist in the modern world for extended periods of time. They are beings of electromagnetism, and as the world at large has become a giant web of electronic devices, beings such as the Djinn begin to fray and dissolve into nothing if they attempt to stay in our world for too long. Ultimately, the Djinn has to return to his plane of existence for years at a time before he can return to ours to spend time with Alithea, an arrangement she is okay with.
• Magical Negro: Only in the literal sense. The Djinn's race does not particularly come up during his interactions with Alithea nor when he's recounting the stories of other owners and he does not die just to advance her story with no weight to his own life. In fact, he has to convince her to even use her three wishes, as she would prefer not to do it since she's well aware of how many of them end up tragically for both the person who made the wish and the genie.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The magical things Alithea witnesses in Istanbul before meeting the djinn are invisible to others, and she believes that they're products of an overactive imagination. This makes her suspect that the djinn is a hallucination as well. While it is possible to interpret the whole film as simply a story written by Alithea, even if the djinn is meant to be real, he never addresses or explains what those prior visions were about or why she experienced them. The only indication that he is real and it's not just her imagination is the very, very last scene where a small kid kicks a soccer ball and the Djinn gives it back to the kid, who thanks him. It's still possible she imagined that part, but it's possible the filmmakers added that last bit to imply everything is real.
• Meaningful Name: Alithea is ancient Greek for "truthfulness".
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer was edited in an energetic and surreal style, while the actual film is much slower-paced and more reflective in tone. Many critics pointed this out as one of the reasons the film did so poorly at the box office.
• No Name Given: The djinn is simply called "Djinn" in the movie, with the issue of his name never coming up. When Alithea stores his things beside a box labeled with the name of her ex-husband, she adds a similar label to the djinn's box but leaves it blank.
• One-Steve Limit: The film includes both King Solomon the Wise and the similarly named Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, 2,500 years apart.
• Refugee from TV Land: When explaining to Alithea his arrangement to grant her three wishes, the Djinn idly plucks a playback of Albert Einstein from the TV in her hotel room and makes him real in the palm of his hand. Einstein begins to panic in confusion before Alithea has the Djinn restore him back to the screen.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: The live-action Alithea's Imaginary Friend Enzo is rendered as a cartoon drawn on lined paper, until she starts fleshing him out more.
• Rule of Three: In a film about stories, this serves as a motif:
  • The film title is about three thousand years.
  • The Djinn offers Alithea three wishes, and tells her three tales from his past.
  • The number three makes many appearances in the background of the film. During one of Alithea's train rides, the Arabic number three (thalatha) is visible in the graffiti on the window behind her. Her hotel room is numbered 333, and her home address? Three.
  • The film's events take place across three cities. (Istanbul, London, and the unnamed capital of Sheba.)
  • The film ends with Djinn visiting Alithea every three years.
• Scheherezade Gambit: Of a forced variety. The Sultan Murad kills storytellers who fail to entertain him. One is good enough to stay in the palace until he dies of old age, and his death causes the sultan immense grief.
• Science Destroys Magic: The film explains that djinn are made of "subtle fire", ie. electromagnetic waves. All of the transmissions of the modern age make it difficult for djinn to exist, as they experience constant interference. This is why djinn have to spend most of their time out of the modern mortal world, though they can still make visits.
• Scientifically Understandable Sorcery: Djinn are described as beings made of electromagnetic waves and are a kind of "living transmitter".
• Serial Romeo: The Djinn's character in a nutshell. As powerful as he is, he's a hopeless romantic whose devotion to his often female masters becomes borderline-obsessive love.
• The Sleepless: The Djinn tells Alithea that his kind do not sleep, so he was fully awake and conscious during his incarcerations in the bottles. When Alithea finds him unresponsive in her cellar he claims he was just sleeping, which she immediately realises is a lie and that he was nearly dead.
• Tragic Villain: Murad IV. He's first seen as a child forced onto the throne at a young age, and later leads his kingdom into war. The pressure from becoming a ruler so young and being exposed to the horrors of war turn the man into a violent, alcoholic tyrant.
• Translator Microbes: When he emerges from the bottle, the djinn initially can't speak English and has to converse with Alithea in Greek. He's soon able to pick up the language from radio and television signals.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: When Alithea arrives in Istanbul, she is accosted by a small "strange" man who is hot to the touch and warns her of djinn. Later, when she gives her conference presentation on the role of myths and how they have been disproven by science, she is haunted by the apparition of an old man who knocks her unconscious. The man is later seen as part of Sheba's court, but neither character (or the reason for their appearance) is mentioned again after Alithea just finds the bottle in a random shop in the Grand Bazaar, with no apparent magical influence guiding her towards discovering it.
• Wishing for More Wishes: As soon as he begins explaining the rules, the djinn tells Alithea that she can't wish for endless wishes; being a professor of storytelling, she is hardly surprised.

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