Much has been made about the slow death of the romantic comedy since its cinematic heyday. But there’s another genre that’s declined right alongside it: tearjerking dramedies that put tough, funny women and their relationships to one another front and center. Movies like Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Terms Of Endearment. Thankfully, writer-director Leah McKendrick is here to revive both at the same time with her new Netflix film Voicemails For Isabelle—a movie that embraces all the lived-in specificity that helped those genres flourish in the ’80s and ’90s while updating their sensibilities with the same modern spikiness she brought to her debut feature Scrambled.
Voicemails For Isabelle proves that what made those films work were their strong comedic screenplays. In an era where so many streaming rom-coms rely on wacky physical comedy and hacky sitcom jokes, it’s a joy to find a script this internationally written—where the humor emerges from the characters’ personalities, histories, and inside references, and where people actually laugh at each other when they’re being funny. It’s what immediately sells the bond between Isabelle (Iris Everly, then Ciara Bravo) and her adventurous older sister Jill (Alice Comer, then Zoey Deutch), who’s committed to living her life to the fullest so she can come home with fun stories to entertain her sibling, who’s stuck at home suffering from cystic fibrosis.
Though the premise of this tearjerker means that Isabelle dies before the plot truly begins, those brief early scenes so effectively capture a chaotic, playful portrait of girlhood that her absence really does loom large. While a lot of movies about someone mourning a dead relative turn the deceased into an angelic embodiment of goodness, Isabelle is funny and crude and opinionated in a way that makes her feel like an actual person to be missed. We only see a few glimpses of the banter-filled long-distance phone calls that sustained their relationship once Jill moved to San Francisco to try and become a pastry chef, yet when Jill refers to Isabelle as the love of her life it rings true.
If Voicemails For Isabelle has a flaw, it’s that the sisterhood throughline is so strong that the rom-com stuff feels a little weak in comparison. But, hey, at least the movie gets to challenge the age-old assertion that Sleepless In Seattle only works because it’s about a woman stalking a grieving man and if the genders were reversed the premise would be too creepy. Here it’s corporate real estate whiz Wes (Nick Robinson) who winds up falling for Jill from afar, when her long, rambling voicemails to Isabelle’s old number land on his new work cell. He starts listening to the messages, first out of curiosity and then because he’s so charmed by her no-filter approach to life. Soon enough, he’s taking a work trip to San Francisco to fulfill the meet-cute fantasy she mentions in one of her messages.
As with Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail (which McKendrick directly name drops), the ethics of what Wes is doing is the central tension of the story, not something the movie thinks is unproblematic. For a while, that’s enough to give some stakes to the charming dynamic that Wes and Jill strike up as he asks her to help show him around the city. Voicemails For Isabelle makes the hilarious observation that Robinson has “sad boy” eyes that give him a wounded puppy dog quality he uses to hide his true playboy ways. Yet while Robinson and Deutch have breezy chemistry together, it doesn’t exactly feel like enough to justify how serious their relationship becomes or how transformative it’s supposed to be for him.
Still, this is very much an “and-a-man” rom-com, where Jill’s self-actualization story is front and center and her relationship with Wes is just one part of it, which makes that weakness matter less than it otherwise might. Deutch is tremendous at dancing along the spectrum from assured to manic to despondent, sometimes all at the same time. Her casual relationship with sex and dating feels true to modern life, just as her dynamic with her demanding chef boss (Nick Offerman) feels true to how workplace sexism manifests. Meanwhile, a flurry of needledrops from artists like Taylor Swift, Benson Boone, and Usher give the film a TikTok-flavored zeitgeist quality that ties it to this moment in time as much as those ’90s rom-coms were tied to theirs. McKendrick even manages to use Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” in a way that rivals its iconic deployment in Girls.
It all adds up to a wonderful surprise of a film, the kind that makes you remember just what we’ve been missing as these women-centric genres have fallen out of fashion. Voicemails For Isabelle will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you believe it’s not embarrassing for a movie to strive to be “life-affirming.” It should also solidify McKendrick as a filmmaker who can finally bring all those elements back into the mainstream.
Director: Leah McKendrick
Writer: Leah McKendrick
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Nick Robinson, Nick Offerman, Lukas Gage, Harry Shum Jr., Ciara Bravo
Release Date: June 19, 2026 (Netflix)
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