Rating: 7/10
I should probably never admit this out loud, but here we are. It has been approximately a week since I watched Voicemails for Isabelle, and Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" is still lodged in my skull like a pop-music parasite I have no interest evicting.
That is, in essence, the peculiar magic of this film. It lingers. Perhaps longer than it has any right to. But linger it does, and after a certain point you stop fighting it.
Director Leah McKendrick's Netflix rom-com arrives at an interesting moment for the genre. The romantic comedy has spent the better part of a decade in critical hospice, periodically pronounced dead by box-office obituaries and then briefly resurrected by streaming algorithms that noticed audiences still crave warmth. 2023's Anyone But You tested whether the form could survive theatrical release; Voicemails for Isabelle answers a different question entirely. Can the rom-com absorb genuine grief without collapsing into mawkishness? Can it be about death and still make you want to dance badly in a kitchen?
The setup is deceptively simple, and deceptively dark. Jill (Zoey Deutch) is an aspiring pastry chef in San Francisco, grinding under the tyrannical Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman) while navigating a dating life that ranges from disappointing to outright humiliating. Her younger sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo), a longtime cystic fibrosis patient, dies early in the film. Jill's coping mechanism is to keep calling Isabelle's old number, leaving long, confessional voicemails about burnt soufflés and terrible men and the particular loneliness of a city that feels indifferent to your presence.
The number has been reassigned. Wes (Nick Robinson), an Austin real estate agent with a surplus of ambition and a deficit of emotional vocabulary, starts receiving them.
Here is where the film could have curdled. The premise is, on paper, deeply creepy. A stranger listens to a grieving woman's most private thoughts, stalks her Instagram, engineers a cross-country "chance" encounter, and pursues a romance built on a lie. McKendrick knows this. Her script has Wes's friends Andy (Harry Shum Jr.) and Breeda (Leah McKendrick) explicitly tell him: "Tom Hanks is America's sweetheart, and you are not Tom Hanks."
The You've Got Mail comparison is invited and then immediately complicated. The film understands that the ethics of 1998 do not map cleanly onto 2026, and that digital voyeurism hits differently when the subject is actively mourning.
What saves the premise — what keeps you from walking out in principle — is the casting. Nick Robinson has built a career on playing young men who are emotionally underdeveloped but fundamentally decent, and Wes fits that archetype precisely. He is not a predator. He is a guy who has pursued the surface-level American Dream with such single-minded intensity — the commissions, the condo, the curated Instagram grid — that he has forgotten what actual human connection feels like.
When he hears Jill's voice, messy and unfiltered and achingly real, he recognizes something he has been starving for without knowing it. Robinson plays this not as obsession but as slow, bewildered awakening. There is a scene where he dances alone to Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" in his kitchen, and it is so goofy and so genuinely joyful that you forgive him almost everything that came before.
Almost everything. The film's third-act revelation, when Jill discovers Wes has been receiving her voicemails, lands with real force precisely because Deutch makes it hurt. She does not do the rom-com thing of being adorably mad for ten minutes before forgiving him. She is devastated. The voicemails were her last connection to her sister, her private grief made tangible, and Wes has contaminated that sanctuary without consent.
Deutch plays this moment with a rawness that elevates the entire film. For a few minutes, Voicemails for Isabelle stops being a rom-com and becomes something more honest about violation and trust.
Deutch has quietly become the most reliable leading lady in contemporary romantic comedy. Since Set It Up in 2018, she has demonstrated a rare ability to be simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, often within the same scene. Here she carries the film's tonal whiplash — from broad workplace comedy with Offerman's absurd French-accented tyrant to quiet moments of grief that feel almost too intimate to watch.
Jill's mourning is not linear. It does not follow the five stages in orderly procession. Some days she is functional and sarcastic and flirting with a stranger on a tour bus. Other days she is furious or numb or leaving another voicemail at 2 a.m. because the alternative is silence, and silence is worse. Deutch lets all of this coexist without smoothing it into a character arc. Grief, the film argues, is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be inhabited.
The supporting cast does strong work within limited screen time. Offerman's Chef Bastien is more caricature than character, but he serves a necessary function as the external pressure that makes Jill's professional and emotional unraveling feel earned rather than arbitrary. Lukas Gage as Arthur, Jill's smarmy coworker, and Toby Sandeman as Tyler, the dating podcaster who ghosts her, both represent the particular mediocrity of modern dating — men who have optimized their personalities for performance without substance.
Harry Shum Jr. provides grounded warmth as Wes's engaged best friend, the kind of person who sees the disaster coming but loves Wes enough to let him walk into it.
Where the film stumbles is in its resolution. The mechanics of the reconciliation — Wes paying to preserve Isabelle's number, the voicemails mysteriously restored after a software update, the climactic New Year's Eve rush through San Francisco streets — feel algorithmically engineered. You can see the Netflix notes in the margins: "Need cathartic ending. Need visual of Golden Gate Bridge. Need Robyn needle drop."
And yes, the Robyn needle drop works. It works because "Dancing on My Own" has become, over fifteen years, the unofficial anthem of crying-while-dancing, of finding transcendence inside private sorrow. The song's inclusion is so on-the-nose it circles back around to being perfect.
But the film's deeper problem is that it wants to have its grief and resolve it too. The final scenes suggest that Jill has reached a place of acceptance, that the voicemails can stop because Wes has replaced what Isabelle represented. This is a lovely romantic notion and a psychologically dubious one. The film is at its best when it resists the pressure to heal Jill completely, when it lets her be angry and messy and still reaching for the phone at midnight. The romance should complement her grief, not cure it.
Still. I am not immune to what this film is selling. There is a reason the romantic comedy keeps getting resurrected. We do not watch these films for their realism. We watch them for the promise that two unlikely people might find each other across distance and circumstance and their own damage, and that the finding might actually matter.
Voicemails for Isabelle delivers that promise with more sincerity than most of its streaming counterparts. It is not Nora Ephron. It is not even peak Nancy Meyers. But it is honest about the fact that love in the 2020s often begins with a screen, with a voice, with the strange intimacy of knowing someone before you have met them.
Is it a guilty pleasure? Perhaps. But I am increasingly suspicious of that phrase. Guilt implies we should be ashamed of wanting warmth, of wanting to believe that grief and joy can coexist, that a woman can lose her sister and still laugh at a bad date and still fall for a man who first fell for her voice. Voicemails for Isabelle is imperfect, occasionally cringeworthy, and structurally predictable. It is also the kind of film that sends you to Spotify afterward, searching for a Swedish pop song from 2010, and then dancing alone in your kitchen at midnight.
Some pleasures should not require an apology.