‘Voicemails for Isabelle’ Netflix Review: Love, Loss and a Slightly Creepy Meet-Cute
After her sister’s death, a woman leaves voicemails to her old number, unaware a stranger is listening and inserting himself into her life.
Platform rom-coms—Netflix ones in particular—have basically become their own subgenre. They’re usually built around a passing bestseller, feature a couple of moderately recognizable faces, and check every familiar box without much discernment: humor, emotion, romance, and a token dose of sex. Voicemails for Isabelle is a bit of an outlier. It has all those ingredients, laid out like a recipe you’re not supposed to tweak, yet it manages to rise above the formula thanks to the charisma of its lead and a clever script that sidesteps the format’s usual mediocrity.
Which is surprising, because on paper it has everything working against it. The film mixes a central romance with a cancer drama—another Netflix specialty—in a blend of two subgenres that could easily turn cloying. But Leah McKendrick, who wrote and directed it, keeps things afloat with a light touch that allows for emotion without tipping into excess. Add to that a magnetic, near–rom-com-star turn from Zoey Deutch, and the movie pulls itself a notch above average. Even at a fairly long two hours, it ends up being a genuinely pleasant watch by streaming standards.
The story follows Jill (Deutch), a sharp, uninhibited young woman growing up in the San Francisco area, deeply bonded to her younger sister Isabella—Izzy—who has cancer. The opening stretch focuses on their relationship: warm, funny, conspiratorial, the kind where sisters tell each other everything as teenagers. It builds, inevitably, to Izzy’s death, by which point Jill is in her late-twenties and training to work at a restaurant run by a tyrannical chef (Nick Offerman, in full-on comic mode). The loss hits her hard. In the midst of her grief, she develops a habit of leaving voicemails on Izzy’s old number, updating her on life—her feelings, her day-to-day struggles, her romantic misfires.
What she doesn’t know is that the number now belongs to Wes (Nick Robinson), a real estate agent in Austin who’s in the middle of separating from his intense girlfriend. He starts listening to Jill’s messages and becomes fascinated with her—without fully knowing her story, but gradually piecing it together. That fascination takes a morally murky turn when, instead of telling her he’s been receiving the messages, he travels to San Francisco and inserts himself into her life, using all that “privileged” information about her tastes, fears, and dating frustrations to get close to her and spark a relationship.
Yes, you can probably guess—more or less—where this is going, how it unfolds, and what beats it will hit. Still, Voicemails for Isabelle works. Deutch is a flexible, engaging performer, equally convincing in awkward comic situations and emotional ones. The script has wit, some sharp turns of phrase, and a steady sense of humor. It’s true that Wes’s behavior veers into creepy, borderline stalker territory by contemporary standards, but the film acknowledges that from the outset and plays with the tension. And when it’s time to lean into the emotional core—Jill’s bond with her sister remains central throughout—McKendrick handles the tonal shift with real control.
The film ticks all the boxes of the modern rom-com, including the now-standard insistence that finding “the one” isn’t Jill’s sole or even primary goal. She has her job, her family, her casual (mostly disastrous) dating life, and her passion for cooking. But Wes, for all the messy deception that brings him into her orbit, genuinely cares about her. And contemporary rom-coms have to balance those two ideas: love may not be everything in a person’s life, but it can still make a real difference—sometimes, even help you get through it.
