Voicemails for Isabelle Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Voicemails for Isabelle combines romance and heartbreak in a charming Netflix film led by excellent performances from Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson. This grief-tinged romantic comedy is built around a misdirected voicemail. Here’s our honest take.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Platform: Netflix
Director: Leah McKendrick
Runtime: 1 hr 58 min
Director: Latham, Dillashaw, and Sievers
Screenwriter: A. Segal, M. Rosenthal, and M. Reilly
Music: Saigontourist
Cinematography: C. Miller
Photographs: J. Marbach
Romantic comedies built around a communication mix-up are practically their own subgenre at this point. Letters in The Shop Around the Corner. Emails in You’ve Got Mail. Texts in Love Again. Now it’s voicemails — and yes, the setup will feel immediately familiar.
What’s surprising is how little that ends up mattering.
Zoey Deutch plays Jill, a grieving pastry chef in San Francisco who lost her younger sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo) to cystic fibrosis. Still processing the loss, she keeps leaving voicemails on her sister’s old number — rambling, honest, often funny messages about her life, her chaotic job, her heartbreaks, her small wins.
What Jill doesn’t know is that the number has been reassigned. Wes, an Austin-based real estate agent played by Nick Robinson, has been receiving every single one of them — and somewhere along the way, without ever meaning to, he starts falling for the stranger on the other end.
It’s a premise that lives or dies entirely on its two leads. The whole emotional engine of the film depends on whether you believe a real connection can form through one-sided voicemails before these two ever meet. Deutch and Robinson both commit fully, and it shows.
Deutch is particularly magnetic. She has always had this rare ability to be genuinely funny and genuinely heartbroken in the same breath, and Jill’s voicemails are where that gift shines most. Robinson has the harder job — conveying growing affection largely through reaction — and he pulls it off more often than not.
When they finally share the screen, that’s when the film really opens up. The chemistry between them is warm, easy, and completely natural. Whatever you’ve been willing to overlook up to that point suddenly feels worth it.
The film’s biggest weakness is that it rarely surprises you. If you’ve spent any time with romantic comedies, you’ll see almost every beat coming — the delayed meet-cute, the third-act misunderstanding, the friends dispensing well-worn advice. Lukas Gage and Harry Shum Jr. add warmth to the supporting cast, but they’re mostly there to serve the plot rather than bring anything unexpected.
Where the film does earn genuine credit is in how it handles grief. Jill’s voicemails aren’t just a cute storytelling device — there’s real pain underneath the humour, and the film doesn’t try to sweep that under the rug once the romance kicks in. It’s a more emotionally honest film than the trailer suggests, and that honesty gives it weight it might not otherwise have had.
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Voicemails for Isabelle isn’t trying to reinvent anything. It knows exactly which films it’s borrowing from and doesn’t pretend otherwise. But borrowed moves, real charm and two performers who genuinely seem to enjoy each other’s company can still add up to a perfectly good evening — and this film delivers exactly that.
Predictable? Yes. Overly familiar? Absolutely. Worth two hours of your time? Deutch and Robinson make sure the answer is yes.
Voicemails for Isabelle is now streaming on Netflix.