DON’T GET AROUND MUCH ANYMORE

Pity the lot of a genie, or, more accurately, a Djinn.

He’s cursed to live, in spectral fashion, inside a bottle. And not the mid-century, pink-pillowed and plush, studio-apartment-like, room-without-a-view of Jeannie in the 60s sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie.

The djinn here, embodied by British actor Idris Elba, is but a wisp of smoke until he is released once again by an unsuspecting owner of said bottle.

This has been going on a very long time.

And there are rules to this sort of thing, as there must be I suppose.

You can’t wish to reanimate someone who is no longer living. And you can’t simply wish for dozens more wishes. It’s three and you’re done.

This is all explained to Alithea Binnie, a divorced woman, played by Tilda Swinton, who wanders into the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul while in the city for a conference. Alithea is a scholar and her expertise happens to be a discipline called narratology, which I understand is the study of story-telling.

Wandering the stalls, she discovers a bottle which she buys and takes back to her hotel room. Of course, it needs a bit of polishing and, as she performs the task, colored smoke billows from its insides and then a huge djinn stands before her ready to grant three wishes, all the while minding those pesky rules of course.

Alithea is too much of a pragmatist to believe in wishes and fairy tales, apart from what she studies. And initially she rebuffs the djinn, telling him she won’t be asking for anything as fanciful as wish-fulfillment.

But the djinn knows that without Althea buying into his plight, he might have to endure another thousand years of longing to be free of the business of wish-granting.

So, he tells her stories of previous owners who squandered their good fortune and these tales are some of the most dazzling ever put on screen.

That they come courtesy of the director of the Mad Max movies, George Miller, is a bit of a surprise. But Miller also gave us “Babe,” so he knows how to weave tales both intimate and incendiary.

Miller’s use of red is in itself striking and I imagine that sometime in the future a film school student will focus on it as the basis of a master’s thesis. For now, though, it’s satisfying to let Miller’s extraordinary color palette just wash over you.

This wouldn’t be much of a story if Alithea doesn’t eventually indulge in a fantasy or two. But one of her wishes is altogether out of character for a prim, no-nonsense academic who can be as brittle as the bottle that got all this started.

And yet I bought it all. Because it’s hard to resist two outstanding actors like Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba who effortlessly make us believe in a tale as old as time.