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Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), the narratologist lead character of George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, has been imagining strange things lately. While walking through the airport with her luggage one afternoon, she’s accosted briefly by a little football-headed imp who eventually slinks a few feet away into what looks like a portal into another dimension. Later, while lecturing at a conference in Istanbul, a literally aglow elderly man in ancient regalia death-glares at her from the audience. After he seems to get closer and closer with every blink — eventually he crashes the stage and appears to swallow Alithea whole — she faints from shock, flashing a thumbs up to the taken-aback crowd after she’s revived and escorted away. She later admits to a colleague that her imagination has been overactive lately but that she doesn’t consider these hallucinations any cause for alarm. They’re signs from the universe, maybe, not to get too complacent in life — to stay on her toes.

But there’s no way to explain away the third, and longest by a lot, fanciful interruption. After buying a glass-blown blue-striped bottle from an antique shop near her hotel, Alithea tries scrubbing off in the bathroom sink the blotch of smoke stains on its side with her electric toothbrush. But before she can finish, out from its spout spews glittering, orange-purple plumes of smoke that clear out in her bedroom. When she goes to check out the potential damage, the first thing she sees is the back of what looks to be a giant — or, more precisely, a pointy-eared djinn (Idris Elba). He’s here to offer in exchange for his freedom what all djinns do: three wishes. 

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