Bottled Up 

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• MGM

There are many things a filmmaker can control, but you can't control the world into which your movie emerges. Sometimes, sudden world events make the story you're telling more or less palatable to an audience. Sometimes, a person associated with the film abruptly becomes toxic. But among the least predictable factors are those that involve other films—the possibility that, close enough to the release of your film, another story has emerged that takes away your intended audience, or can't help but make yours seem worse by comparison.

Everything Everywhere All At Once became an unexpected hit this year by taking genre elements like wuxia martial arts and alternate realities and melding them to a tale built on feelings of isolation and the need for deep interpersonal connections. There's a very similar vibe that veteran filmmaker George Miller (the Mad Max series) is aiming for in Three Thousand Years of Longing, a centuries-spanning narrative of magic, desire and heartbreak, except that he can't pull all of those pieces together. Everything Everywhere's success on both a cosmic and human scale emphasizes how Three Thousand Years of Longing only nails it at one of the two.

Adapting an A.S. Byatt short story, Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore tell the story of Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), an academic "narratologist" single-mindedly devoted to her field of study at the expense of all personal relationships. While attending a conference in Istanbul, Alithea happens upon a bottle in a shop, and finds that it contains a powerful Djinn (Idris Elba). While the Djinn requires Alithea to make three wishes in order to release him from his bondage, Alithea knows enough about "wish stories" to be skeptical, forcing the Djinn to take Alithea into his confidence with stories of his long life.

Conceptually, it's a neat idea to build a conventional genie story around someone steeped in the "Monkey's Paw"-type ironic comeuppances in these cautionary tales. Three Thousand Years of Longing never wants us to forget about the power of mythology and storytelling, including naming the airline Alithea flies on "Shaharazad," or even nodding to modern super-hero stories (which doubles as Miller's reference to his once-planned Justice League adaptation). And the film also makes it clear how the act of sharing stories from your own experience becomes a crucial part of building intimacy, explaining oneself in the same way that great mythological stories once explained natural phenomena.

Miller does so with plenty of visual imagination, starting off with the massive form the Djinn initially takes upon his release, and the electromagnetic energy that perpetually appears to be drifting off of his body. The period-piece settings of the Djinn's tales—in Ottoman Empire palaces and ancient battlefields—allow for some striking scenes, and provide the framework for giving the connection between our two main characters an epic scope.

Or rather, make that the intended connection between our two main characters, because that's where Three Thousand Years of Longing falls short. It's challenging enough that the supporting characters in the Djinn's stories rarely develop personalities of their own, with Elba's narration doing nearly all of the heavy lifting for the largely Turkish cast of actors. But the pivot point of this narrative is the coming together of these two characters experiencing very different kinds of loneliness—the Djinn's from his centuries stuck in a bottle, Alithea's based on her personal choices. And that relationship just never clicks, remaining at the superficial level of a fairy tale rather than digging deeply into what they truly need and want from one another; Swinton in particular never seems to let down her academic reserve, making it hard to understand what she learns from this fantastical experience.

That's a problem Everything Everywhere All At Once never forced its audience to wrestle with, so effective was its exploration of the central mother-daughter relationship. Mystical experiences can only take a viewer so far when what they really want is the same thing the characters want—a chance to make an emotional connection. Three Thousand Years of Longing gets the fantasy right, but when it comes pulling us into the reality of how we make and unmake the ways we are separated from others, it keeps all of its emotions bottled up.