Movies Like What We Wanted
If you loved What We Wanted's Drama storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

Eat Pray Love
A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to "find herself".

Call Me by Your Name
In the summer of 1983, a 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa in Italy. One day Oliver, a graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.

Hot Milk
Rose and her daughter Sofia travel to the Spanish seaside town of Almería to consult with the shamanic Dr. Gomez, a physician who could possibly hold the cure to Rose’s mystery illness, which has left her bound to a wheelchair. But in the sultry atmosphere of this sun-bleached town Sofia, who has been trapped by her mother’s illness all her life, finally starts to shed her inhibitions, enticed by the persuasive charms of enigmatic traveller Ingrid.

The Lost Daughter
A woman's seaside vacation takes a dark turn when her obsession with a young mother forces her to confront secrets from her past.

Unrelated
A woman in an unhappy relationship takes refuge with a friend's family on holiday in Tuscany.

Bonjour Tristesse
At the height of summer, 18-year-old Cécile is relaxing by the French seaside with her father and falling in love with her new boyfriend. The arrival of her late mother's enigmatic friend turns her world upside down.

Bonjour Tristesse
A spoiled teenager spends the summer at the French Riviera with her rich, widower, playboy father, but when his old flame resurfaces, she resolves to keep her frivolous lifestyle at all costs.
More Movies Like What We Wanted

A Bigger Splash
An American couple, Paul and Marianne, spend their vacation in Italy and experience trouble when Marianne invites a former lover and his teenage daughter to visit, which leads to jealousy and dangerous sexual scenarios.

Stealing Beauty
Lucy Harmon, an American teenager is arriving in the lush Tuscan countryside to be sculpted by a family friend who lives in a beautiful villa. Lucy visited there four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with an Italian boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted.

The Time Traveler's Wife
Due to a genetic disorder, handsome librarian Henry DeTamble involuntarily zips through time, appearing at various moments in the life of his true love, the beautiful artist Clare Abshire.

The Roses
Life seems easy for picture-perfect couple Ivy and Theo: successful careers, a loving marriage, great kids. But beneath the façade of their supposed ideal life, a storm is brewing – as Theo's career nosedives while Ivy's own ambitions take off, a tinderbox of fierce competition and hidden resentment ignites.

Revolutionary Road
A young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s struggle to come to terms with their personal problems while trying to raise their two children. Based on a novel by Richard Yates.

The Four Seasons
Three middle-aged wealthy couples take vacations together in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Along the way we are treated to mid-life, marital, parental and other crises.

Paradise
A 10-year-old boy spends a summer in the country with a childless couple and a precocious girl.

The Talented Mr. Ripley
Tom Ripley is a calculating young man who believes it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. Opportunity knocks in the form of a wealthy U.S. shipbuilder who hires Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his playboy son, Dickie. Ripley worms his way into the idyllic lives of Dickie and his girlfriend, plunging into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

Die My Love
After inheriting a remote Montana house, Jackson moves there from New York with his partner Grace, and the couple soon welcome a child. As Jackson becomes increasingly absent and rural isolation sets in, Grace struggles with loneliness, creative frustration, and unresolved emotional wounds. What begins as an attempt at renewal gradually turns into an intense psychological descent, placing strain on their relationship and exposing the fragile balance between love, identity, and motherhood.

Turbulence
Young married couple Zach and Emmy decide to take a hot air balloon trip across the Italian Dolomites to rekindle their relationship. When they and pilot Harry are joined by a third passenger, Julia, events unfold in ways they could never imagine five thousand meters in the air.

Madea's Destination Wedding
Madea packs her best floral dresses and a whole lot of chaos when the Simmons family heads to the Bahamas for her grandniece's whirlwind wedding.

Sex and the City 2
Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda are all married now, but they're still up for a little fun in the sun. When Samantha gets the chance to visit one of the most extravagant vacation destinations on the planet and offers to bring them all along, they surmise that a women-only retreat may be the perfect excuse to eschew their responsibilities and remember what life was like before they decided to settle down.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with What We Wanted (2020): Drama themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of What We Wanted.
See full details for What We Wanted (2020)
