Nick Robinson and Zoey Deutch in Voicemails for Isabelle. Photograph: Netflix/PA View image in fullscreen Nick Robinson and Zoey Deutch in Voicemails for Isabelle. Photograph: Netflix/PA Romance films Review Voicemails for Isabelle review – Netflix romcom picks creepy over cute Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson stumble in this mushy, overlong story of a woman leaving voicemails for her dead sister
Benjamin Lee Fri 19 Jun 2026 01.00 CEST Last modified on Fri 19 Jun 2026 01.02 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T here’s a fine line between romantic comedy and creepy thriller, and while redefining the genre’s lovelorn leads as often incredibly oddball stalkers is nothing new (see the Sleepless in Seattle trailer recut as a horror movie 20 years ago), an online deluge of memes and thinkpieces have elevated post-movie bar jokes to commonly accepted theory. Some film-makers have slowly tried to catch up and capitalise – last year’s dark comedy I Love You Forever showed how epic acts of romance can be rooted in manipulation while a great deal of what makes current box office record-breaker Obsession so effective is its horror movie perversion of the day-to-day realities of all-consuming true love.
Read more Netflix’s latest romcom Voicemails for Isabelle is made with some awareness of how unsettling its premise is, as if it was originally written in the 2000s and then dusted off and tweaked for the 2020s (the film was originally set to star Hailee Steinfeld back in the 2010s). It’s the story of Jill (Zoey Deutch) who, in the throes of grief for her late sister, starts leaving voicemails on her old phone as a way to feel like she’s still a part of her life. But the number now belongs to a stranger, Wes (Nick Robinson), who decides to not only listen to them but to use the information to track Jill down and insert himself into her life, eventually winning her heart while refusing to be honest about why they’ve met.
Writer-director Leah McKendrick enjoys winking at us, as if we’re all on the same team, using her characters (and herself playing one of them) to call her leading man a “creeper” and to refer to the situation as “a sick reboot of You’ve Got Mail”. But, instead of leaning into what’s essentially the set-up for a stalker-thriller, McKendrick tries to have it both ways, poking fun at the weirdness of her meet-cute while also expecting us to bask in the basic, hot chocolate pleasures of it. There are two Taylor Swift songs (surely thanks to her friend Este Haim on soundtrack duty), scenes of our leading lady (who wants to be a pastry chef!) eating Breyers ice-cream with the tub neatly positioned toward the camera, a running in the rain climax and enough overly curated outfit changes to warrant a specially created H&M collection.
McKendrick wants to transport us back to a time when a film such as this would have been a theatrical wide release while also bringing a modern, poppy sensibility: dating buzzwords like gaslit, secure attachment and love bombing are all scattered in the dialogue. While her film does feel glossy (as one of Sony’s films with the streamer, it looks slicker than the usual), it just doesn’t have the required charm to it and merely pointing out the uneasiness of Wes’s behaviour does not magically make it any less uneasy.
Rather than reminding us of You’ve Got Mail, as McKendrick would very much like to, it’s more reminiscent of 2023’s rubbishy one-star romcom Love Again , which saw Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s grievin...