What We Wanted 2020

Alice Lavinia Wilson and Niklas Elyas M’Barek are a married couple living in Austria whose dream of starting a family has been crushed by a string of failed IVF attempts. The weight of infertility casts a quiet, stubborn shadow over their days, turning even shared moments into tests of patience and closeness. In a bid to escape the emotional grind, they choose a vacation on the sunny coast of Sardinia, hoping the sea breeze might offer a different rhythm for their relationship.

At a sun-kissed holiday resort, they encounter a lively German family—a couple with two children—whose warmth and everyday bustle stand in stark contrast to their own longing. This new friendship sharpens the ache they carry, reminding them of what they yearn for but cannot have. The presence of others’ ordinary happiness becomes a mirror that intensifies their own grief, envy, and the unspoken ache that has settled between them.

As days unfold, tensions simmer between Alice and Niklas, their frustrations and unspoken grief spilling into quiet disagreements. A moment that rattles both of them comes when Alice disappears briefly, causing panic among the couple and the resort guests. Her return feels grounding, a sign that her inner storm has not dissolved but has shifted into a more manageable fever—the turning point in a sorrow that had been slowly shaping their lives.

A sobering turn arrives with a crisis from the neighboring guests: their teenage son attempts suicide by taking several over-the-counter medications and is found unconscious beside the pool. The frightening sight jolts the couple into a stark awareness of life’s fragility and the choices that shape a family. This incident prompts them to reevaluate the very idea of parenthood, confronting how fragile hope can be when the past remains unresolved.

In the film’s quiet, patient final passages, the two protagonists share a small, intimate moment that signals a fragile peace. They seem to have learned to live with their loss and to begin redefining their future without a conventional path to parenthood; healing arrives not as a dramatic cure but as a gradual softening of their doubts. The last scenes leave their future deliberately open, suggesting that recovery has begun and that, perhaps, they are now closer than they were at the start—not whole, but quietly renewed.

• Note: The primary characters mentioned here are represented by their performers: Alice Lavinia Wilson and Niklas Elyas M’Barek. If you revisit these names, you’ll also see the cast credited in the shared pages for the film.