Voicemails for Isabelle
Inventive dialogue and effervescent performances brighten up a Netflix romcom with a neat twist in the telling.
Coincidental courtship: Nick Robinson and Zoey Deutch
Photo courtesy of Netflix.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The high concept at the heart of Voicemails for Isabelle feels like something its writer-director (and co-star) Leah McKendrick might have nicked from a foreign-language film. But, no, the work is all her own, being a witty and heart-warming thing trespassing on the coattails of You’ve Got Mail (1998) and all sorts of romantic classics that it has the good grace to allude to. It seems that all of McKendrick’s characters know their romcom lore, much as the victims in Scream know their horror films.
The movie starts well, in the year 2010 at the Austin Academy in Texas, where the sisters Jill and Isabelle Shaw live in each other’s pockets, as much as they can, as Isabelle is at home with cystic fibrosis. So Isabelle lives vicariously through the early sexual escapades of Jill, who French kisses a boy at school and recounts the glorious details to her sibling. But boys don’t come off well in McKendrick’s script – or men in general – so Jill’s balloon is rudely burst when her snotty Romeo tells his mates that Jill tastes like beef jerky. Even more cruelly, he suggests to everybody (within earshot) that Jill’s sister must taste like cancer.
After Jill has left school and moved to San Francisco to attend a culinary academy, she continues to date the opposite sex, but they are a miserable, self-centred and inconsiderate lot. All this she relays with relish to Isabelle back in Austin, poetic rants preserved on voicemails that would make Collen Hoover blush. Meanwhile, real estate agent Wes (Nick Robinson), who also lives in Austin, is having little luck with his whacky girlfriend Brittani (Zenia Marshall). There’s then a lovely sequence in which Jill and Wes’s romantic disasters are cross-cut at key moments, even though the protagonists are hundreds of miles apart and have yet to meet. Then, when Isabelle dies, Jill continues to send her vivid voicemails to her sister, which have been re-routed to Wes’s new office phone. Intending to let Jill know of the mix-up, Wes finds that the messages catch his heart and he cannot stop listening...
As Jill, Zoey Deutch brings her characteristic warmth and vitality to bear, prompting one to wonder why she isn’t a bigger star. As Wes, Nick Robinson has seldom been more engaging, offsetting the alcoholic, emotionally abusive Sean Boyd that he played in the Netflix series Maid. Although the circumstances of Wes and Jill’s union are not entirely legitimate, it is hard not to root for such smart, magnetic souls.
While at times Voicemails for Isabelle feels mechanical and predictable, it is saved by McKendrick’s sparkling dialogue and the strength of its concept. It follows a line of romcoms in which the male beau has to surmount certain false pretences to win the heart of the girl he has fallen for hook, line, and sinker. It’s certainly a welcome antidote to the doom and gloom dished out by so many streaming titles of late, and while it hardly wrests the crown from When Harry Met Sally or Notting Hill (which it references) it has enough joy and throat-catching sequences to make it a worthy addition to the genre. It really is a delight.
Cast: Zoey Deutch, Nick Robinson, Harry Shum Jr, Leah McKendrick, Lukas Gage, Ciara Bravo, Nick Offerman, Megan Danso, Gil Bellows, Toby Sandeman, Spencer Lord, Tanis Dolman, Alice Comer, Iris Everly, Zenia Marshall, Calix Fraser, Chirag Naik, Jocelyn Ayanna, Elijah Carnazzo.
Dir Leah McKendrick, Pro Todd Black, Becky Sanderman, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch, Screenplay Leah McKendrick, Ph Julia Swain, Pro Des Celine Diano, Ed Lee Haxall and Ryan C. Fill, Music Este Haim and Amanda Yamate, Costumes Carla Hetland.
Sony Pictures/Escape Artists-Netflix.
118 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 19 June 2026. Cert. 15.
