I enjoyed this movie more than I expected to. I thought it was going to be some kind of mystical journey with a guru or something. Instead, it’s a pretty good story reminiscent of those found in The Arabian Nights.

I don’t recommend you watch it necessarily, because there are a lot of scenes with naked people. Including multiple scenes with multiple obese naked people in a room covered with fur. (Yes, strange. And disgusting. It was the Ottoman Empire, what can I say?)

So given that you will probably not be watching it, I won’t worry about spoilers.

The Summary

Alithea is a “narratologist” (story expert) who travels to Istanbul for a conference. While in front of an audience, she keeps seeing a frightening, oversized, deadly white guy dressed as, maybe, an ancient Babylonian. This vision opens its mouth and appears to swallow her, and she passes out. Now, maybe I wasn’t paying very good attention, but it seems to me that this scary guy is a plot hole that never gets explained. He shows up in the background in some scenes later in the story, but it is never brought out what, if anything, is his relationship to the main action of the story. Ditto the odd dwarf character with the tall, Nephilim-like head who tries to take Alithea’s suitcase in the Istanbul airport.

Anyway, it’s after this that the main story begins. In a Turkish junk shop, Alithea buys a little blown-glass bottle that has been somewhat deformed at some point by a fire. She takes it back to her hotel room, starts scrubbing it, and out comes a djinn (Idris Elba). At first, Alithea and the djinn can’t communicate, but she finds that she can speak to him in Greek, and after a few moments of watching TV, he picks up on English. He tells her that she gets three wishes, but as a story expert, she knows that every single story involving three wishes is a cautionary tale, so her response is something along the lines of “no way.”

Then the djinn starts to tell his own story, which spans three thousand years. He has had three episodes of being imprisoned in various small vessels. Apparently, he was originally a free djinn, and was in love with the queen of Sheba (incidentally also his cousin – cue nakedness). When Solomon, who in this version of the story was the supplicant, shows up and woos the queen, the djinn’s heart is broken, and Solomon, “a powerful wizard,” imprisons him for the first time.

The first person to release him is a slave girl who’s in love with a prince. She wishes for the prince to fall in love with her, and then to become pregnant by him. Unfortunately, she gets caught up in palace politics, and when the prince falls out of favor, she is killed before she can make her third wish.

The second attempted escape, and imprisonment, is the one featuring the fat people in the sable room. It’s sad and grotesque, but has no love interest for the djinn.

In the third go-round, the djinn is released by a plain but intelligent young woman who is the third wife of a rich man and is essentially a prisoner. (No nudity, but horrifying brief sex scenes with her aged husband.) This young lady uses her first two wishes to learn “all the knowledge in the world” (she and djinn are shown studying together) and to become a formidable scientist. This is where we learn that the djinn is made of electromagnetic particles: “You are made of dust. I am made of subtle fire.” He falls in love with her mind, and tries to prevent her making her third wish so that he can stay with her forever. Feeling controlled, she accidentally traps him in the glass bottle with her third wish.

By the time the narratologist has heard these moving stories, she is ready to make a wish. She wishes to experience that kind of world-without-end love … with the djinn.

C’mon … Really?

At this point the cynic in me wakes up and says, Lady, has it occurred to you that this very large magical dude is telling you these sad stories in order to elicit precisely that wish? He’s lived through millennia having a once-in-a-lifetime love with one human woman after another. The man is an interdimensional slut.

However, the writers for this movie are not as cynical as I am. The djinn appears to make a good-faith effort to fulfill Alithea’s wish, even traveling back with her to London. When it becomes apparent that living in a large, modern city is too hard on him, in a metaphysical sort of way, Alithea wishes “If you cannot stay with me, I wish that you could be where you belong.” (Again: Was that his goal all along?) He does come back and visit her from time to time, which is nice and makes it seem less like she got played.

And here come the giants finally

For those who are interested in my books, this movie has a similar sort of vibe in a few different ways. For one thing, it features an older woman having an affair with a large, impressive foreign man with whom she can’t at first communicate. (I’m always a sucker for scenes where people try to find a common language.) In fact, if Hollywood is paying attention, Idris Elba could do a fine job playing Nimri. (Tilda Swinton could not play Zillah. Sorry.)

But secondly, and on to the main point of this post … giants.

I have put giants in my books because they feature in Scripture and in history. I have made them scary, nonhuman creatures because that is what they are in Scripture and in history, but prior to this, I was never particularly frightened by the idea of giants. I didn’t think of a larger size as anything necessarily to be afraid of, so I didn’t find them scary until I started researching what the historical record says about their behavior.

But watching this movie, I discovered that their size itself makes me physically uncomfortable.

When the djinn first comes out of the bottle, it’s in the form of particles. These particles swirl out of the hotel bathroom and into the main part of the hotel room. The next thing that Alithea sees are enormous golden toes sticking in through the bathroom door.

When she goes out into the bedroom, the djinn is so large that he is literally crouched over like a person trapped in a small box. The camera doesn’t show us this right away. It just shows her face looking at something disturbing and incredible. Then when we do see the djinn, we still don’t get a look at his face, because his back is to us.

Already at this point, I was thinking my first wish would be, “Could you please make yourself smaller?” His size is inconvenient and it makes the room seem weird.

Soon, the djinn makes himself a bit more human-sized (and dons a hotel bathrobe, as you can see above). But even then, he is not … quite … on a human scale. He’s just a little bit too big. The picture above doesn’t capture this very well, but it’s the closest I could find. Tilda Swinton is petite, but she’s not that petite compared to the other humans in the story. She’s not that much shorter than they are.

Somewhat surprisingly, this also made me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the way that the different scale messes with your perception of reality and your ability to trust your own senses. He’s too big to be human, but he’s not a tank like, say, Shaq. He’s in proportion – just not human proportion.

I was surprised by the fact that this made me — I repeat — physically uncomfortable. So, I guess, it turns out, my stories are even creepier than I realized. Because even when they are well-intentioned (?), like this djinn, I really don’t like giants.