More Than a Love Story
Netflix’s Voicemails for Isabelle arrives wearing the familiar clothes of a romantic comedy – two strangers, an accidental connection, the slow burn toward something more. But within the first act, it becomes clear that writer-director Leah McKendrick built this film around something heavier: the specific, consuming weight of losing someone you cannot imagine living without. The romance is real, but it’s scaffolding for a story about grief.
The premise threads both ideas together with unusual economy. Jill, played by Zoey Deutch, loses her sister and best friend Isabelle (Ciara Bravo) and begins leaving voicemails at Isabelle’s old number – a number that has since been reassigned to Wes (Nick Robinson), a stranger who becomes the unintended recipient of her mourning. It’s the kind of setup that could tip into gimmick, but the cast and the material seem to understand exactly what they’re working with.
What Deutch and Robinson Brought to the Material
Deutch was direct about what drew her to the script. “I think Leah did a really beautiful job navigating a very intense subject,” she said, “and everybody deals with grief differently, of course, but when I read it, I felt that it was a really beautiful portrayal of what it feels like to love someone so much and lose them.” For Deutch, the emotional anchor of the film isn’t the romance at all – it’s the sister relationship. “It’s the heart of the film,” she said, “the sister love story.”
Robinson’s read on the story pushed that idea further. He described Jill’s grief and her capacity for romantic love as functions of the same interior force – one that expands as the other does. “This isn’t a love story just as much between Jill and Isabelle as it is between Jill and Wes,” he said. “I thought that was a really beautiful aspect to this whole story.” It’s an observation that reframes the film’s structure: the relationship with Wes doesn’t replace Isabelle, it grows in the space grief carved open.
That reading puts both actors in an interesting position. Deutch is carrying the visible emotional labor – the voicemails, the loss, the public unraveling – while Robinson is playing someone who enters the story as a bystander and has to reckon with what it means to be trusted with someone else’s grief before he’s earned it. Neither role is straightforward, and the film doesn’t try to make them so.
McKendrick Wrote It Before She Knew What It Would Mean
McKendrick wrote the script more than eight years ago. At the time, she wasn’t writing from personal experience with loss – she was writing from love, and from a conviction that non-romantic love deserves the same weight that films routinely hand to romantic storylines. The script sat with that priority built in from the beginning, which may explain why the grief in the film doesn’t feel retrofitted or decorative.
That origin matters because it shifts the question of what the film is actually doing. McKendrick wasn’t processing something that had happened to her – she was making an argument, early, about which relationships get to be called central. The romantic plot between Jill and Wes exists inside a story that was always, first, about sisters.
Why This Kind of Film Is Hard to Pull Off
Mixing grief with romantic comedy is a structural problem as much as an emotional one. The genre conventions of a rom-com push toward lightness, resolution, and momentum – grief does the opposite. It circles, stalls, returns without warning. Films that try to hold both tend to sacrifice one: either the grief becomes a backstory detail that the romance rescues the protagonist from, or the romantic elements feel awkward and intrusive against the heavier material.
Voicemails for Isabelle attempts a third path, where the grief doesn’t get resolved by the love story – it coexists with it. Whether McKendrick pulls that off across the full runtime is the question audiences will bring to the film, but the architecture is clearly there. The voicemail device is doing a lot of work: it keeps Isabelle present in a story she can’t appear in, and it makes Wes a witness before he’s a love interest, which changes the terms of everything that follows.
The San Francisco fan screening on June 18, 2026, at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission was one of the first public glimpses of how the film lands with audiences. Deutch and Robinson both attended. Early reactions from that kind of event tend to be generous, but the shape of the film’s emotional argument – that grief and love aren’t opposed, that non-romantic bonds belong at the center of the story – is clear enough that it will either land or it won’t based on the writing, not the marketing.
McKendrick spent eight years carrying a script about a phone number that connects the living to the dead. Whatever the film becomes commercially on Netflix, that’s not a story someone writes casually – and the number Wes picks up, the one Isabelle used to have, never really stops being hers.
