Published June 19, 2026, 4:00 p.m. ET

Voicemails for Isabelle (now on Netflix) is sort of a test to see if Zoey Deutch is a comedic alchemist. She has a tendency to be the best — and usually the funniest — thing in whatever movie she’s in, even if whatever movie isn’t very good (and is inevitably made better by her performance). Leah McKendrick writes and directs this high-concept romantic comedy that essentially requires its star to use her considerable talents to compensate for some core creepiness and enough heavy-handed self-awareness to make us feel like a cat being stroked backward.

VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: IN. SEPARABLE. Izzy (Ciara Bravo) and Jill (Deutch) are the tightest sisters in the history of siblingdom. Growing up, they did everything together and told each other everything in their hearts and heads. Izzy spent much of her life bedridden with cystic fibrosis and lived vicariously through Jill, who’d do crazy stuff just to make that vicarious living more vibrant, e.g., beating the pus out of a jerk boy at school and relishing in Jill’s suspension so they can both be home to concoct wild kitchen experiments that inevitably find their dad rushing in with the fire extinguisher. Those experiments inspired Jill’s culinary school stint and move to San Francisco to chase her dream of being a chef, while Izzy stayed behind in Austin, ailing and basking remotely in the high comedy of her sister’s disastrous dating life.

Toiling as a prep cook alongside d-bags and d-nozzles for a high-end ego-asshat Top Chef runner-up chef (Nick Offerman) is a trash gig made better for Jill thanks to the mere existence of Izzy. But I know you know where this is headed. It’s implied in the title of the movie and made crystalline early in the story. Izzy succumbs to the disease, and suddenly, the joy of chopping kumquats all day every day for a sentient slab of booger jello has become as miserable as it sounds. Jill still calls Izzy’s number and leaves confessional voicemails, an act of therapy that allows her to cope with, say, a popular, hot-as-Hades dating podcaster (Toby Sandeman) being a hit-it-and-forget-it hypocrite, prompting her to let rip with a righteous Zoey Deutch harangue in front of an adoring throng of his admirers. Fist. Pump.

Here’s the thing, though: Izzy’s number was recycled and now belongs to Wes (Nick Robinson), who gets the voicemails but doesn’t call or text Jill to tell her what’s up, because if he did, this would be a reasonable movie based somewhat in a facsimile of reality instead of a ludicrous one that ceaselessly namedrops all the classic rom-coms of the past 30-odd years. Wes stalks Jill on social media then visits San Fran “for work” and finds her on her favorite park bench and they hit it off. And Wes therefore finds himself at the Fulcrum of Rom-Com Plot Contrivance: Will he tell her the truth or let it ride? I think we already addressed this with the “facsimile of reality” sentence above. The real question here is, if Wes is wholly earnest in his intentions but making a bad decision, does that make him an unforgivable creep who needs some damn help? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? McKendrick’s screenplay has the gall to feature the line, “This is like a sick reboot of You’ve Got Mail!” It invokes every movie she wants Voicemails to be: The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, The Fault in Our Stars, Notting Hill (note: DO NOT invoke the greatest of modern rom-coms lightly, thank you), Hitch, Love Actually, Jerry Maguire, even Brokeback Mountain.  

Performance Worth Watching: Again, please show me a movie starring Deutch that features a performance better than Deutch’s. I’ll wait. 

Sex And Skin: Some sexy stuff, but no nudes.

Our Take: Well, the success or failure of Voicemails for Isabelle all depends on whether you take the premise seriously or write it off as ’90s-style high-concept “harmlessness” and just go with it. It may very well be that Wes is worse than the podcaster jerk, but hey, at least he arrives at his appreciation for Jill with a pure heart? Sort of? There’s a way to thread the needle between the seriousness or stupidity of that concept, and the film almost kinda does it thanks to Deutch, who’s effervescent and funny and renders Jill bubbly and a touch chaotic but ultimately pretty deep and substantive, and it’s highly enjoyable to watch her fly off the handle and tear the walls down with an exquisitely modulated comedic rant. Where were we? Right, contemplating how the co-lead in a rom-com violates and exploits the other lead character’s sacred emotional space, and acknowledging how we’re sometimes almost fully distracted from this hard truth by Deutch’s endearing performance.

Is it okay if we do as the movie wants us to, and brush aside the stalkerisms, accepting this as a silly glossy gob of unapologetic Hollywood fiction? The film is fairly persuasive, and distracts us with another key flaw, the rampant and reflexive look-ma-I’m-a-silly-rom-com self-awareness that seems to be an attempt to justify or apologize for the off-putting premise and the plot’s more predictable qualities. And on top of that, McKendrick throws in not one, but two Taylor Swift needle-drops, possibly as a top-shelf distraction technique.

There’s potential within this sprawling script — it bumps up against the two-hour mark — for a better, more insightful movie, hints of which make themselves known in the first 40 minutes or so, which hurtles along energetically with chop-chop-chop edits that goose the pace, enhance the comedy, and mirror Jill’s toil with the kumquats. It loses some steam about halfway through, not coincidentally when The Plot thickens with Wes and Jill’s first meeting, and his subsequent choice to not tell her the truth. Does the film get better or worse from there? Slightly the latter, but again, the laughs are fairly bountiful, and Deutch hard-sells the entire endeavor with her seemingly effortless charisma. Accepting Wes’s attempt to vie for earnest redemption within the hour is wholly expected, and therefore slightly easier to swallow in the context of silly rom-coms that know they’re silly rom-coms. The nagging sense that Deutch and her character deserve better falls by the wayside as you watch her dance to a joyous Robyn track like no one’s watching and realize that you might do idiotic and indefensible things in attempt to earn her affection, too.

Our Call: Voicemails for Isabelle has a pile of problems, but Deutch ain’t one of them. There are worse things in life than clamping off the moral outrage of reality while watching a rom-com that knows it’s absolutely not reality –—and apparently using a whole lotta pretzel logic — so you can enjoy an inspired Deutch performance. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.