THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (2022)

This review may contain spoilers.

There's some delight to be taken from the overstuffed visuals on display here—it seems that Miller is enjoying himself, anyway, and that's worth something. But things start to go badly wrong the moment Swinton's Alithea Binnie makes her first wish from Elba's Djinn. [Spoilers follow!] For one thing, her wish for the Djinn's love represents a sharp reversal of Binnie's claims to be happy with her solitude and independence—OK, sure, people tell themselves self-protective lies all the time, but just once I'd like to see a film where a middle-aged woman says "I'm happy being alone" and it isn't later revealed that she's secretly longing for love. More importantly, though, the idea that love must be freely given and cannot be coerced should be plainly evident to anyone who thinks about it for more than half a second, and the fact that someone like Binnie, who the film considers bright, fails to realize that in the moment (only for it to form the basis of a shattering realization later) represents a grievous error that the movie never begins to recover from. Not sure if the flaw is in Miller's script (co-written by his daughter, Augusta Gore), or if it's in the original A. S. Byatt short story, but this narrative choice leaves a rancid stink over the remainder of the proceedings, including the ostensibly happy ending.