It does. It really, genuinely does. And the reason it works is both simple and surprisingly hard to pull off: grief is in every part of this movie, and it colors everything Jill does and says, and even how she feels. But the movie isn’t about how you grieve — it’s about how to keep moving forward. And that makes it way more uplifting than it had any right to be.

What’s This Thing Actually About

Jill is an aspiring baker living in San Francisco, working under an abusive chef named Bastien. She regularly relates her life to her sister Isabelle — a cystic fibrosis patient living back home in Austin — over the phone. After Isabelle’s abrupt death, Jill starts leaving voicemails on her number, unaware that it has been reassigned to an Austin-based real estate agent named Wes.

So yes, technically this is a film about a woman accidentally sending her most unfiltered, chaotic, deeply personal audio confessions to a complete stranger. As the film’s writer-director Leah McKendrick puts it: “Voicemails cannot be edited or rewritten. They’re usually messy, awkward, inarticulate — sometimes confessional. Like a stream of consciousness, they always go a little off the rails.” That’s not just a description of the plot device. That’s the movie’s entire emotional philosophy. Jill is unedited. Unpolished. Talking to her dead sister about everything from her nightmare boss to, apparently, a brief and deeply ill-advised stint posting feet pictures online. She is a lot. And Wes, receiving these voicemails from a stranger in San Francisco, falls for her before he’s even met her.

The premise sounds like it should be unbearably cringe. It is instead unbearably charming.

Zoey Deutch Is Doing Something Special Here

Let’s be clear about something: Zoey Deutch is Netflix’s rom-com gold. She has been since Set It Up back in 2018, and she has not lost a single watt of whatever specific frequency she operates on. But what she does in Voicemails for Isabelle is something more than charm deployment. Deutch carries Jill’s grief constantly and quietly, adding a weight to what would otherwise be a pure plot device.

The voicemails are funny sometimes howlingly so but they’re also, if you listen past the comedy, a woman talking to someone who can’t talk back, filling a silence she doesn’t know how to live in yet. Deutch never lets you forget that. Even in the film’s most genuinely comedic moments, there’s something underneath Jill that the performance holds carefully. It’s the kind of work that rom-coms don’t usually require and rarely get, and it elevates the entire film around her.

Their first meeting soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s “Marjorie,” which is doing real emotional heavy lifting — sees Wes find Jill at her bench overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. He awkwardly fumbles a few pick-up lines; she goes on a rant about why she had to stop posting feet pictures. It crackles with chemistry.

Nick Robinson: Welcome Back

Nick Robinson is just as charming. And honestly? That’s not a given. Robinson has been away from the rom-com space for a while now, and there was a real question of whether the specific kind of warmth his best performances carry would still be available on demand. The answer is yes, fully, with the added bonus of slightly more lived-in quality that his mid-twenties work didn’t quite have.

Wes is genuinely decent in a way that the film doesn’t feel the need to announce. One night, when Jill falls asleep while they’re watching TV, Wes carries her into her bedroom, tucks her in, and returns to the couch to sleep alone. No drama. No scene made of it. Just a quiet piece of character writing that tells you everything about who he is. The rom-com genre lives or dies on whether the male lead is someone you’d actually want the female lead to end up with, and Wes passes that test completely.

The Supporting Cast That Makes It Work

Nick Offerman as Chef Bastien is exactly what you’d hope Nick Offerman playing an abusive French chef would be: gloriously horrible, immaculately committed to the bit, and genuinely funny every single time he appears. Bastien promotes Arthur — Lukas Gage, doing wonderfully specific work as a kitchen disaster — to baker despite the man turning in a raw soufflé, which is the catalyst for Jill flying into a rage and quitting her job. Lukas Gage in this role is one of 2026’s small comedy gifts. The man has no right to be this funny.

Ciara Bravo as Isabelle, seen primarily in flashback, is the film’s quiet emotional anchor. The sisterhood the film establishes between Jill and Izzy in relatively brief screen time is what makes every voicemail land with the weight it needs to. If you didn’t believe in that relationship, the entire premise collapses. Bravo makes you believe it immediately.

The One Thing That Doesn’t Quite Land

The film is 118 minutes, and it feels it in the second act. The middle section, where Jill and Wes are circling each other and the script needs to manufacture reasons they can’t just talk things through, is the most formulaic stretch ; the point where Voicemails for Isabelle most clearly reveals its genre bones. What this charmer of a film has that keeps us engaged, if not originality, is the couple at the center of it all. That’s an honest assessment. The plot mechanics are familiar. The contrivances exist. A few too many scenes in the middle could be trimmed without losing anything essential.

But here’s the thing about a rom-com that has genuine chemistry and genuine emotional stakes: you forgive the scaffolding because what the scaffolding is holding up is worth the effort.

The Ending And That Song

Without spoiling the specifics: the film’s final moments involve both Jill and Wes calling Isabelle’s number at the same time, Jill saying it will be her last voicemail because she thinks she’ll be okay now, and the DJ suddenly playing Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” ; Jill and Izzy’s favorite song. Wes takes it as a sign. They dance.

This generation’s version of “you had me at hello.” That’s what one critic called it, and while that’s a bold claim, it’s not wrong about the register the ending is reaching for. The Robyn song does exactly what the best romantic comedy musical moments do ; it takes all the emotional accumulation of the previous two hours and focuses it into a single image. You will either cry, grin, or both, probably simultaneously, and you will feel slightly embarrassed about how much you meant it.

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