Director: George Miller
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Pia Thunderbolt, Berk Ozturk and Anthony Moisset
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Nudity, sex, violence and occasional coarse language

This fantasy film of Australian and US origin tells the story of a travelling academic who encounters a Genie in a bottle. He offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.

This romantic-drama film is an Arabian Nights-style fantasy about the relationship between a British academic and an ancient Genie. It is an adaptation of a novella published in 1994, titled The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, by author, writer and critic, Antonia S Byatt. The movie is co-written, co-produced, and directed by Australian George Miller, who directed the Mad Max adventure-thriller movies. This film follows his 2015 hard-core, road-warrior, action film Mad Max: Fury Road. Filmed around the campus at Sydney University.

Alithea Binnie (Swinton) is an acclaimed British Professor of Narratology, who travels to Turkey to be a guest speaker at an academic conference. She is reasonably content with life, but ‘a solitary person by nature’. Her discipline of Narratology is the study of narratives and narrative structure, and the ways they influence human perception. Alithea is an expert in telling stories and analysing stories that are told. The film soon finds her alone in her hotel suite in Istanbul, with a glass bottle that she brought at an antique shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. She polishes the bottle with her electric toothbrush and releases a Djinn (Elba) – who vows to deliver her heart’s desire, whatever that might be.

Alithea knows that Djinns can’t always be trusted and the wishes they promise can be risky; she won’t respond until she knows the stories that the Genie wants to tell. The Djinn, who has spent thousands of years in confinement, tells Alithea stories about the Ottoman Empire and the Queen of Sheba. He pleads with her to make a wish that will grant him his freedom, and he offers her three wishes in exchange for it. Alithea and the Genie sit together, and the Genie recounts his various adventures with famous women he has loved through the passage of time. The Djinn has accumulated a history of misery by pursuing different loves, that have all ended in heartbreak.

The Genie’s stories arouse in Alithea the desire to be loved. Initially, she thinks the Genie is trying to trick her, which he denies. Her academic background has told her that wish-fulfilment fantasies reflected in narrative form often hide cautionary tales, but as the narratives proceed, the Genie’s stories begin to fascinate her, and she finally makes a wish that surprises the Genie and herself.

Miller, as director, moves across different visual boundaries. The film strongly reinforces the power of story-telling, and is humanistic in tone. Swinton is ideally suited to the role of Alithea. In this and other films, such as Memoria (2021); she excels as a character who ruminates introspectively by pondering the complexities of the meaning of life through inquiry into the nature of human existence. Acting associated with the Genie’s stories, such as by Thunderbolt, is impressive only in secondary ways. It is the diverse nature of the film’s fantasy scenarios, the evocative richness of its imagery, and the movie’s innovative plotline that will linger in memory. The movie is a complete turn-around from Miller’s Mad Max series.

Elba tells his stories compellingly, and the Genie’s stories make observations about life that have definite meaning for Alithea, as well as for the Genie. The narratives that are recounted are full of adventure, sadness, nostalgia, and romance, and inspired by Eastern mythology.

The film is a bitter-sweet, fairy-tale conceit that mingles romance with mythology. The film is a romantic fantasy about a lonely academic who converses with a Genie. The movie is a story about stories, but ultimately about the agony, ecstasy and complexity of love, which has special significance for Alithea. The film is a remarkable achievement for director Miller, whose imagination, is powered by the writings of Byatt, and almost ambushes the viewer.