By Ed Symkus

Action and kids film director George Miller goes the adult fantasy route.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is playing at AMC Boston Common 19, Showcase Superlux Chestnut Hill, Regal Fenway, and Kendall Square Cinema.

Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton in a scene from Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Allow me to paraphrase Ringo Starr in A Hard Day’s Night. The actor Wilfrid Brambell is trying to dissuade the drummer from reading a copy of John D. Voelker’s Anatomy of a Murder. Ringo, looking and sounding forlorn, says, “You can learn from books.”

Well, you can learn from movies, too. Even movies that are dazzling, effects-filled fantasies serving as parables about attempts to escape from the complexities of modern life.

In Three Thousand Years of Longing, I learned, among many other bits of information, the word “narratologist” (someone who researches the history and impact of telling stories), and why a Genie – the proper word is Djinn – grants three wishes to whoever is responsible for his or her release from captivity (once the wishes are bestowed, the Djinn is allowed to return to The Realm of Djinn).

In a real change of pace for Australian director and habitual pace-changer George Miller — his résumé includes The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo’s Oil, Happy Feet, and all four Mad Max films — this adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s 1994 short story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is a fairy tale for adults.

Starting with the familiar premise of someone unwittingly freeing a Djinn from a bottle and being offered the customary trio of wishes, the film wastes no time developing tangents from which to leap.

London-based narratologist Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), on a research trip to Istanbul, starts having visions, the sort that feature big, scary demonic fellows lunging at her, causing her to swoon. “I’m OK,” she says upon waking. “My imagination has been ambushing me.”

Cut to her finding a small glass bottle in a Turkish bazaar (“I’m sure this has an interesting story,” says the woman who studies yarns), then to her washing it and, of course, rubbing it, in her hotel room, then to a cloud of smoke pouring from it and taking the shape of a golden 10-foot-tall Djinn (Idris Elba).

Here comes the obligatory business of the three wishes, accompanied by a great deal of unexpected twists and turns: Alithea and the Djinn must converse in Greek until he watches enough television to pick up English; before granting any wishes, he asks her to tell him about herself; she’s not really into asking for wishes because she considers them cautionary tales (but he’s desperate for the freedom those wishes will bring him); he makes himself smaller “to fit in better” (and not take up half of her hotel room).

What results is a plethora of stories, and stories within stories, as Alithea and the Djinn take turns telling of their pasts, of her childhood, of his doomed romances and incarcerations in bottles. Via gorgeous visual effects and production design, those stories are played out on canvases ranging from colorful palaces to war-torn battlefields, and eventually back to the streets of London.

Keeping things moving at a fairly slow pace, Miller opts for wide shots in the flashback storytelling sequences and close-ups of the two protagonists whenever they’re talking to each other. And the script, by Miller and Augusta Gore, regularly points out their differences — his past is filled with tragedy, hers is vague; she is lonely, he is endlessly curious — before eventually making it clear that they are very comfortable together.

It’s easy to fall under the film’s dreamy spell, but it’s difficult to forget Alithea’s earlier confession that her imagination has ambushed her. I wondered, from time to time while watching it, how much was real and how much might have been in her head. But maybe that was my own active imagination. One thing is certain: As the characters’ separate stories slowly merge into one, the film gives them a hazy, hopeful ending that hints of happiness.

Ed Symkus is a Boston native and Emerson College graduate. He went to Woodstock, is a fan of Harry Crews, Sax Rohmer, and John Wyndham, and has visited the Outer Hebrides, the Lofoten Islands, Anglesey, Mykonos, the Azores, Catalina, Kangaroo Island, and the Isle of Capri with his wife Lisa.