A Rom-Com That Arrives Already Carrying Something Heavy
Netflix’s Voicemails for Isabelle opens not with a meet-cute but with a funeral in the making – or at least the slow dread of one. Jill, played by Zoey Deutch, has been leaving voicemails for her dead sister Isabelle, unaware that Isabelle’s old number has been reassigned to a stranger named Wes, played by Nick Robinson. Wes, charmed by the raw intimacy flooding his voicemail inbox, engineers an encounter with Jill near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. That premise – grief mistaken for courtship – could have been a disaster. It mostly isn’t.
The film draws obvious comparisons to You’ve Got Mail, another story where a romantic connection is built on information the other person didn’t knowingly share. But Voicemails for Isabelle has darker lumber in its frame. Isabelle is played by Ciara Bravo, and her role is not a brief flashback device – she’s a full presence throughout, which is exactly what makes her absence land so hard when it finally arrives.
Why the First Twenty Minutes Matter More Than They Should
The film spends roughly 20 minutes in the past before ever arriving at its central storyline – long enough that some viewers will shift in their seats. Entertainment writers Lauren McNamara and Rachel Choy, reviewing the film, noted that some audiences might find that opening stretch slow. But that time is doing structural work. Rather than relying on a quick montage to establish a sisterly bond, the film builds the relationship between Jill and Isabelle with accumulated detail: how they grew up together, how they function as each other’s closest person, how the idea of separation is something both of them actively refuse to think about.
That investment pays off. When the separation does come, McNamara described it simply as “absolutely heartbreaking.” The foundation isn’t decorative – the entire emotional logic of the movie depends on the audience believing these two women would choose each other over anyone else, and the film earns that belief before asking you to watch it get destroyed. Grief stories that skip this step tend to feel manipulative. This one doesn’t.
The Tonal Swings Are the Point
What keeps Voicemails for Isabelle from collapsing under its own weight is that it doesn’t stay in the dark. Nick Offerman appears as a chef written at a pitch somewhere between eccentric and unhinged, providing the kind of comic relief that doesn’t defuse emotion so much as give it room to breathe. Lukas Gage plays what McNamara and Choy describe as “the worst guy you’ve ever met” – a character who seems to exist specifically to remind audiences that the world outside grief is still populated with petty irritants and romantic landmines.
These tonal darts – from genuine heartbreak to absurdist comedy to awkward romance – aren’t a sign of tonal confusion. They’re actually the film’s clearest argument. Life doesn’t pause the funny stuff when someone is dying or grieving. It keeps throwing both at you simultaneously, often on the same afternoon.
Deutch, who has built a career in rom-coms including Set It Up, doesn’t play Jill as someone performing grief for the camera. The character’s mourning feels embedded rather than demonstrated – something she carries into every other scene, including the ones with Robinson that are technically supposed to be light. That layering is what separates the performance from a standard genre turn.
Robinson’s Wes is harder to assess cleanly. He stages a meet-cute with Jill using information she never intended for him – a point McNamara and Choy flag directly, raising the question of whether a relationship can sustain itself when it’s constructed on that kind of deceit. The film doesn’t answer that question tidily, which is either its most honest quality or its most frustrating one, depending on your tolerance for romantic ambiguity.
Deutch and Bravo as the Film’s Real Center
The romance between Jill and Wes drives the plot. The relationship between Jill and Isabelle drives the film. Deutch and Bravo play sisters who are also each other’s best friends, and the chemistry between them is specific enough to feel unperformed. There’s a particular kind of shorthand that develops between people who have known each other their entire lives – a way of not finishing sentences, of laughing at things nobody else would find funny – and the film captures it without underlining it.
Bravo’s role is structurally unusual. Isabelle exists primarily in the past timeline and in Jill’s voicemails – she’s present in memory and in voice, not in scene. Playing a character who is already gone requires a different kind of screen presence, and Bravo handles it with enough specificity that Isabelle feels like a real person rather than an idealized ghost. That specificity is what makes the loss feel proportionate to the grief.
What the Film Gets Right, and What It Asks You to Overlook
For a genre that has historically treated grief as a plot device – a dead parent to explain a character’s emotional unavailability, a lost love to justify the new one – Voicemails for Isabelle treats mourning as something ongoing and non-linear. Jill isn’t healed by falling for Wes. She’s still grieving while it’s happening. That’s a more accurate picture of how loss works, and the film is better for committing to it rather than staging a cathartic breakthrough in the third act.
The San Francisco setting gives the film visual texture – the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop for a staged coincidence has a certain irony to it, a landmark so associated with romantic mythology that using it for a scene built on calculated deception feels almost pointed. Whether that’s intentional is unclear. What is clear is that the film’s strongest elements are the ones it probably had to fight for: the long opening, the unresolved ethical question around Wes’s behavior, the refusal to clean up grief into closure. The rom-com packaging makes those choices easier to absorb. It also makes you wonder what the film might have been if it had leaned harder into the darker material and trusted the audience to follow it there without the safety net of genre.
Nick Offerman’s chef has at least one scene that reportedly runs long enough to shift the film’s register entirely. Whether that scene earns its place or overstays its welcome may depend entirely on how much absurdism you can absorb while still holding onto the emotional thread that runs underneath it.
