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

Daringly ambitious with some remarkable visuals, eclectic director George Miller’s latest film is about the power of storytelling and the connections that spring from it, yet it fails to fully grip its audience.

Adapted from the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” by A.S. Byatt, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” sets up mythical and epic love stories for the ages.

It borrows from millennia of folkloric traditions but never fully fleshes out those stories. Instead, it treats them to an even-paced retelling, which doesn’t make for interesting viewing.

Miller, who co-wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore, sets up this romantic world with stars Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, each of whom could read a phone book and make it sound interesting. With the loquaciousness of the script and those quintessential Miller visuals, the film sounds and looks great. But it feels too much like window dressing on a story that is pulled too thin.

Swinton plays the bookish and happily single Alithea, a brilliant narratologist who travels to the far-flung corners of the world drinking in the stories of the places she visits. While attending a conference in Istanbul, she begins seeing other-worldly characters around her. Because that’s not an entirely new phenomenon for her, she shrugs it off.

When a friend of hers purchases a gift of her choice from a stall in the Grand Bazaar, she chooses a pretty, but damaged, glass bottle. The following morning, she decides to give it a little bit of a cleaning with her electric toothbrush, and she awakens the Djinn (Elba) that has been trapped within its confines for over 100 years.

Thankful for being released, he offers to grant her the standard three wishes. Alithea, being familiar with such stories of wishes, Djinn and the cautionary tales they become, along with being perfectly content in her life, declines to make the wishes.

The Djinn, however, is tied to her until he fulfills those choices. The two begin swapping stories about their lives, heavily leaning on the Djinn’s thread of how he became trapped in the bottle a few times over the past 3,000 years. With each story told, their connection grows.

As the Djinn recounts the three stories that brought him to Alithea, we get a glimpse at the events that put him in the bottle each time. These feel more like vignettes, with Elba generically narrating instead of each being fully lived-in moments of the film. It’s as though someone is just telling a story, rather than showing you and making you feel it as the characters do. That was Miller’s choice, but it creates a disconnect and makes it harder for “Three Thousand Years” to engross its audience.

Elba and Swinton are well cast, but they have little to do other than tell a story or listen to one. The bulk of the action takes place within the worlds that the Djinn is recounting, so we see less of them and more of the ancillary characters within those stories. And because, again, we’re being told about them rather than experiencing the story for ourselves, they don’t stand out from the rest.

There are some really great visuals, but the effects don’t seem to match Miller’s intended visions. Some seem hasty and flat, others full-fledged fantastical feats.

The stories are good, and I appreciate that in the few moments we get to hear the characters in the Djinn’s tales talk, they are speaking languages other than English (as they should in stories taking place in what is modern-day Turkey).

The message that is being woven about love and connection is clear, and the film’s ties to storytelling traditions shine through with references to “1001 Arabian Nights,” the rule of threes and more. It’s a tapestry paying homage to the countless stories that have been told since time immemorial, but those threads aren’t as richly tied together or as cohesive as they could be, and it weakens the film on the whole.

On screens this week: The blockbuster that started it all, “Jaws,” is taking a bite out of the silver screen again, this time in IMAX and in 3D, and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” also swings back into theaters. Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in “Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul” in both theaters and streaming on Peacock. Grab your precious and settle in for the most expensive show of all time with the premiere of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime with new episodes dropping weekly.

“Three Thousand Years of Longing”

108 minutes

Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence.

2 stars