Somewhere in the first twenty minutes of Voicemails for Isabelle, a character looks directly into the camera of the genre and says, out loud, that this is not A Walk to Remember. A few scenes later, Jill tells someone she feels like Meg Ryan. And when Wes nervously confesses to his best friends that he has been listening to voicemails meant for a dead woman and has developed feelings for the person leaving them, they tell him: Tom Hanks is America’s sweetheart, and you are not Tom Hanks.
The film knows exactly what it is doing. Writer-director Leah McKendrick is in conversation with the entire history of the romantic comedy, nodding to Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and A Walk to Remember not as lazy shorthand but as a genuine argument. Those films built the language she is working in, and she is fluent in it while writing something entirely her own.
The Story
Jill, played by Zoey Deutch, is an aspiring baker grinding away under an abusive chef in San Francisco. Her sister Isabelle, played by Ciara Bravo, has cystic fibrosis and lives back home in Austin. They talk constantly. When Isabelle dies, Jill keeps talking, leaving voicemails on her sister’s number because stopping feels like losing her all over again.
What Jill does not know is that Isabelle’s number has been reassigned to Wes, played by Nick Robinson, a closed-off Austin real estate agent who starts receiving these raw, funny, confessional, deeply human messages from a stranger processing the worst thing that has ever happened to her. He falls in love. Of course he does. Anyone would.
The film is two love stories running simultaneously. The first is between sisters, and it is the beating heart of everything. McKendrick gives us enough of Jill and Isabelle together to make the loss feel real and the voicemails feel necessary rather than strange. The second is between Jill and Wes, and it earns every moment of its payoff precisely because the first story is so fully realized.
The Performances
Zoey Deutch, who previously charmed in Set It Up and has built a career on being the most watchable person in any room she walks into, is doing the best work of her life here. The voicemails alone are a performance challenge most actors would stumble over. They need to be funny and messy and real and heartbreaking all at once, and Deutch makes them feel like something you are overhearing rather than something written and rehearsed. The scene where she realizes Wes’s phone has been receiving her calls is one of the most affecting moments in recent romantic comedy memory.
Nick Robinson, returning to the genre that first made him a name to know, is perfectly calibrated as Wes. The character could easily have come across as creepy given the premise, and Robinson navigates that tightrope with real skill, making Wes’s growing feelings feel tender and inevitable rather than unsettling. The chemistry between the two leads is genuine and warm and the kind of thing you cannot manufacture.
The supporting cast around them is excellent. Nick Offerman as the monstrous chef Bastien is doing what Nick Offerman does, which is be exactly as good as the role requires. Harry Shum Jr. and McKendrick herself as Andy and Breeda are the best friend couple that every rom-com needs and rarely gets right, the kind of duo you would genuinely want to have dinner with.
The Rom-Com Callbacks
McKendrick is clearly a student of the genre, and part of what makes Voicemails for Isabelle so satisfying is how deliberately it places itself within the tradition. The Sleepless in Seattle DNA is obvious from the premise, two people falling for each other across a distance without ever properly meeting, but McKendrick earns the comparison rather than coasting on it. The film’s awareness of its own genre history feels playful rather than defensive, winking at the audience while also genuinely delivering the emotional beats those earlier films built their reputations on.
The Meg Ryan moment lands because Deutch has genuinely earned it by that point in the film. You are not Tom Hanks lands because the film has already asked you to sit with the ethical complexity of the premise rather than waving it away. This is a rom-com that respects your intelligence while also giving you exactly what you came for.
The Music
The film closes on Robyn’s Dancing on My Own, Jill and Isabelle’s favorite song, and it is devastating and perfect. The score from Este Haim and Amanda Yamate, who also worked together on Do Revenge and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, gives the film a warm and slightly melancholic texture that suits the material exactly. Music supervisor Season Kent threads the needle between heartfelt and fun throughout.
The Verdict
Voicemails for Isabelle is the rare romantic comedy that earns its grand gesture, its third act reconciliation, and its final kiss not by cheating on the emotional work required to get there but by doing that work completely. Leah McKendrick has made a film that understands grief and joy and desire and sisterhood, and has found a way to hold all of those things at once without dropping any of them. Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson are going to make a lot of people very happy on a lot of Friday nights for years to come.
This is what the genre looks like when it is operating at its absolute best.
Voicemails for Isabelle is streaming now on Netflix. Rated TV-14. Directed by Leah McKendrick. Runtime: 1 hour 58 minutes.
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