"The Life of Wishes" is the kind of film that makes you stare at the screen in fascinated disbelief - like watching a snow globe that someone shook a little too enthusiastically and then decided to film for 96 minutes.
Matthias Schweighöfer plays Felix, the patron saint of German Millennials: vaguely creative, chronically overwhelmed, and spiritually anchored somewhere between a Berlin-Mitte co-working space and an Instagram quote tile. He's stuck in a failing marriage, losing his hair, and working for a smirking corporate villain named Gideon - because of course the evil boss in a German wish-fulfillment fable must be named Gideon.
As Felix stumbles through his midlife fog, he enters a mystical wish-shop run by a Mephistophelean proprietor who grants him a dangerously clever request: "I wish that all my wishes come true... until I find the one that makes me happy."
What follows is a kaleidoscope of clichés: magically restored hairlines, faux-Silicon-Valley satire about monetizing hate, a dream-flight through a concert hall, a "deep" pool scene with a mysterious musician, and - naturally - a meteorite threatening Earth, because why not?
Every frame looks like a Christmas-market souvenir. Every line feels like it was ghostwritten by a mindfulness influencer. The film aches to be profound but ends up drowning in self-help platitudes so worn-out you could swear they were lifted straight from a Spiegel bestseller shelf.
This would all be harmless fluff if the movie didn't pretend to wrestle with the Big Questions: free will, self-actualization, the meaning of happiness. But instead of offering insight, it delivers warmed-over moral lessons about "finding your inner compass" - the kind of phrase that usually appears embroidered on pillows in overpriced boutique cafés.
Cinephiles will instantly think of Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer's brutal, visionary exploration of identity and second chances. Seconds strips the soul bare. The Life of Wishes offers the spiritual depth of an Edeka Christmas commercial. Where Seconds shows the terror behind the fantasy, Schweighöfer's film retreats into cozy spießigkeit - suburban comfort dressed as profundity.
Worst of all, the film unintentionally reveals the exhaustion of the German "media millennial" generation: twenty years of dominating mainstream culture, yet capable now only of producing feel-good wallpaper disguised as existential cinema.
To give a man unlimited wishes and end up with nothing but Hallmark-level insights - that takes a special kind of creative bankruptcy.
Conclusion:
Aesthetic kitsch, narrative confusion, and philosophical shallowness collide to create a film that desperately wants to be meaningful, but barely manages to be memorable. It is, without exaggeration, the most painfully earnest and unintentionally spießig Matthias-Schweighöfer film to date.
