Voicemails for Isabelle isn’t your typical rom-com. To be fair, it never promised to be. Instead, the movie is a deconstruction of how grief shapes us and what it means to move on after you’ve lost a sibling.
It is, above all, a movie about loss. Grief is in every part of the movie, and it colors everything Jill (Zoey Deutch) 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.
At the center of the story is Wes (Nick Robinson). Wes is a workaholic who gets assigned a new number at work. That work number just so happens to be the number that used to belong to Isabelle, Jill’s dead sister. So, of course, in an absurd move that only makes sense in a rom-com, he decides to just keep listening to them. No, he doesn’t just do that. He starts getting attached to Jill through the stories she tells. There’s an investment there.
So, what does the lead in a rom-com do? Evidently, use the knowledge gained from those voicemails to—in a very questionable move—gain Jill’s trust. It sounds worse than it is when it turns into a romance, because Wes does actually seem to like Jill, and he does seem to have good intentions at heart, even if the setup is as wild as it can be. But of course, this is a rom-com. Good intentions are a given. In real life, you’d run away from a man who does this.
Voicemail-related drama aside, and I promise there gets to a point where you can put it aside, the movie actually utilizes Deutch and Robinson pretty well. The two have an easy, believable chemistry, even as Wes questions if commitment is for him and Jill wonders why every man she likes turns out to be horrible. (Hint: you really don’t know how to pick them). Plus, when this movie turns into a rom-com, it’s a really fun one.
It just takes a while to get there, and boy, be ready to cry like a baby at the first fifteen minutes or so. I did. If you can get through that and through the feeling that this is anything but a rom-com, things are never going to get better, and life sucks, you’ll probably discover that this movie is actually pretty good. There’s a good message here about moving forward and how that doesn’t necessarily mean being healed.
But it’s certainly not a movie for everyone, as cute as Jill and Wes can be. If you’re looking for escapism in your rom-coms, this one doesn’t really provide that. Life is hard here. It doesn’t get easy right away. Love doesn’t fix everything. But sometimes, that can be a good message.
Love doesn’t have to fix you. In real life, it won’t. But love can be a light in the darkness, and it can mean having a shoulder to lean on when things get hard. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of Voicemails for Isabelle? Share with us in the comments below!
Voicemails for Isabelle is now streaming on Netflix.
