WHAT’S this? Idris Elba on screens again? Two weeks in a row, two new major releases? Talk about hogging the limelight. Although, to give Elba his due, Three Thousand Years of Longing is an entirely different beast…to Beast.

From Mad Max’s own George Miller - the film producer who also gifted the world 1995’s Babe - Three Thousand Years of Longing is a cacophony of quirks. A melee of wilfully obtuse twists and turns, designed to wrong-foot all those who dare second guess its script.

The film comes inspired by Dame A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a 1994 published novella, which was itself inspired by a long lineage of fairy tales.

It’s all very Arabian Nights in scope and that’s the visual diving board from which John Seale (Rain Man, The English Patient) leaps.

Elba stars as the titular Djinn, a genie who, as such beings often do in stories, is primed to gift three wishes to whomever it is that releases him from the antique that is his prison.

The endlessly ethereal Tilda Swinton plays Alithea Binnie, a lonely British scholar who does just that.

Alithea’s speciality is narratology, a study of story telling in structure. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s wary of the Djinn’s offer.

The consequences of a genie’s wish are rarely worth the initial pleasure. “This wishing,” she observes, “is a hazardous business.”

As is, of course, filmmaking. Three Thousand Years of Longing is a mixed bag of an offering. One in which the brilliant and mundane co-exist. Such is the nature of its explorative interest in storytelling.

Owing to her wariness, Alithea invites the Djinn to tell tales of the three thousand years of wishes he has granted. Thereafter, tale follows tale and wish follows wish. Some prove more engaging than others. Few quite justify the price of admission.

As the finale closes in, the sense of an overarching, building theme finally clicks into place. Miller’s criticism of the concept of orientalist othering begins to sharpen in focus, while the pathos with which soaks his leads gradually osmosis into a response worthy of their collective performative calibre.

From the extraordinary peak that was Mad Max: Fury Road, Three Thousand Years can’t help but feel a little underwhelming. And yet, there are concepts and achievements here that prove Miller has still got it.