Romance is a story, but it’s also a wish. And as all the stories about genies and bottles make clear, a wish is a kind of trap — not least because it can trap you in a story about desire.

George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is a film about romance and stories and wishes that traps you in the same old historical tropes, only to turn them into smoke before your eyes. It’s a love letter to narrative and to all those who mistrust it.

The movie is based, with some fidelity, on the wonderful A.S. Byatt novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” The film, like the story, is about Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), a scholar of narratology — the study of stories — who attends a conference in Istanbul. She purchases a souvenir bottle, and when she accidentally removes the stopper in her hotel room, a djinn (Idris Elba) appears. He must grant her three wishes to set himself free. But Alithea, as a student of narrative, has read many, many stories about wishes, and she knows that they always end badly for the wisher.