Directed By Leah McKendrick

Starring – Zoey Deutch, Nick Robinson, Harry Shum Jr.

The Plot – After losing her baby sister, a young pastry chef (Deutch) can’t stop leaving the long, rambling voicemails she always left, unaware the number now belongs to a stranger (Robinson) across the country who slowly falls for her one message at a time, and begins waiting for the next

Rated TV-14 for sexual content, suggestive jokes, adult language and alcohol use

Voicemails for Isabelle | Official Trailer | Netflix

POSITIVES

If a romantic comedy is to survive, especially on Netflix’s terms, it should not only conjure compelling characters with a firm balance of empathy and vulnerability to the distinguishment of their designs, but also ground the execution of its storytelling towards feeling entirely relatable, and while Voicemails For Isabelle does contain an elaborately layered concept requiring a bit of suspension of disbelief and convenience in the eventual merging of its protagonists, it’s very much an emotionally devastating and thoughtfully profound look at grief in the world of dating, making it a charmingly affectionate affair that helps elevate its straight-to-streaming captivity. As to where most genre-based films would utilize the death of a character manipulatively to overcome the limitations of a lackluster script, McKendrick instead orchestrates this gut-wrenching impact during the movie’s opening act, before mediating back towards a comedically dependent atmosphere that refuses to wallow in the depths of its despair for too long, instead utilizing ample opportunity in the generousness of a nearly two hour runtime that spends a majority of its time fleshing the roughly rigid dating lives of these respective characters, in turn establishing a foundational commonality long before they’ve ever even met on-screen. This is where the film feels like it leaves no proverbial stone unturned within its literary origins, as scenes that would typically be omitted from the finished product are instead appraised to surmise an alluring connection that allows Jill and Wes to act as the required substance to fill the void in their lives, and considering the two do a surprising amount of their acting oppositely off-screen of one another, it leaves the audience clamoring for the inevitable day that their paths will cross, a meeting made all the more endearing with the magnetic performances of Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson lending limitless humanity to the candidness of their respective portrayals. For Deutch, she renders an abundance of radiantly sassy personality and endearing innocence that she openly embraces within this girl-next-door kind of charming exuberance, masking much of the tender frailty underlining in grief that Deutch articulates effortlessly in the character’s confronting of the untimely passing of her sister and best friend. As for Robinson, he maintains much of the sincere sensibilities of his iconic 2018 turn in Love, Simon, where everything from the nuances of his instinctive body language to the painful pressure of the character’s maintained secret flourishes palpable influence over the integrity of his performance, bringing with it the kind of dependability for leading man morality, even with a relationship that at least immediately requires a bit more obscuring of the vital transparency between them. As a result, Deutch and Robinson attain the kind of seamless chemistry that transpires both a friendship and relationship spark between them, without the depths of McKendrick’s direction feeling like it freely forces them to converge artificially, in order to override a lack of symmetry on-screen, and while each are certainly talented enough to carry corresponding subplots separately, the movie’s best moments are undeniably those spent together, particularly in the confines of the atypical music montage of them wandering the streets of San Francisco with love in their eyes and food in their grasp. Beyond meaningful minutes and prominent performances, the film is of course elevated considerably by Leah McKendrick’s dazzling direction, both in the warmly intoxicating affectionateness of her whimsically enamoring presentation and the pungency for personality, which feels like it caters expansively to both sides of a dating couple seeking to spend a quietly isolated night inside. Despite some initial hesitations with a comedically overdone opening act, the film surprisingly settles quite ideally in the balance of its intended emotionality between the second and third accommodating acts, adopting much more of a beneficially natural form of maturity in the expositional development of its depicted characters, with less and less selfish intrusions by eccentric outsiders to take away considerably from the film’s maintained focus. As for the craft that Leah enacts, much about the permeating intimacy between Jill and Wes’ spontaneous dynamic is articulated by intoxicating lighting and a wandering eye for aforementioned body language among the movie’s visual storytelling, that helps close the gap of the lack of history between the characters, but even opposite of the dashing dynamic between the characters at the movie’s forefront focus, the establishing shots of breathtaking scenery in and around San Francisco preheats the atmospheric ambiance of McKendrick’s luminous staging, evoking much more stylistic flare and artistic maturity than expected from only a sophomore director who played the newscaster in last year’s awful I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel. Lastly, despite its aforementioned near two hour runtime, the film’s consistency for pacing transpires seamlessly smooth in the deliberately patient means of its thematic storytelling, with very little weight of impactful relevance acting out against the integrity of the exploration. As previously indicated, this is especially the case during the superior second half of the movie, in which the stakes of the conflict are surmised specifically to catapult an engine of urgency into the movie’s climax, but even as expectations eventually catch up to the familiarity of a story that doesn’t remotely evade predictability, some late act developments of the characters prove that its most meaningful moments are anything but behind it, leaving very little excessive heft to a movie of limitless avenues to vividly exploit.

NEGATIVES

While Voicemails For Isabelle feels like a breath of fresh air to a library full of Netflix offerings on the shortlist of some of the most recent year’s worst films, it’s still a formulaically predictable excursion that fails to evade an overwhelming majority of genre-honored tropes in its occasionally derivative execution, particularly the most glaringly obvious of those instances that have since been spoofed in satirical movies about the romantic comedy subgenre. Without spoiling much about the film, I will say that it’s full of overzealous supporting characters, the likes of which are cartoonishly animated with morally shallow intention that makes our two protagonists feel like the only sanely grounded people in the bunch, but also a third act break-up that can be effectively interpreted from the very moment the two characters meet, based entirely on Wes’ brainless idea to keep the truth of his voicemails away from Jill, as well as a grand stage resolution with interchangeable pop song and convenient confusion as to why Jill was mad at Wes in the first place. Even if these unfortunate aspects are a part of an overwhelming majority of romantic comedies past and present, McKendrick’s inability to muster them in creatively deconstructing methods prove how little creativity went into deviating away from the pact, an aspect that feels glaringly evident with the script’s dialogue repeatedly calling back a litany of familiar genre favorites, which gets tediously tacky as quick as the third time that it attempts it. Maintaining these outdated ingredients not only makes this movie feel like you’ve experienced it long before you actually have, but beyond that proves that as much of its accessibility towards unfavorable audience demographics is for nothing in a movie that settles conservatively as possible, perhaps serving as the only reason why this film failed to see the light of day on the silver screen. Aside from the stacked cliches of its subgenre, the film also gets off to a rough start, courtesy of its desire to enact an overly comedic opening act, where the abrasiveness of the material doesn’t correspond seamlessly with a sentimentally established tone that tonally deviates extremely from one scene to the next. This movie’s idea of earned subtlety goes one second from Jill’s sister passing away, to the next involving Jill drunk-dialing her sister’s voicemail, near the Golden Gate Bridge, and talking about whose dick the character has to suck to get a breakfast burrito, and while it’s simply just one of the many instances like it where the tone of the film clashes continuously with McKendrick’s direction, it never becomes easier to grasp the intended emotionality of each scene, leaving its most dramatic of moments falling frigidly flat, on account of going from one extreme to the next with its encompassing impulses.

OVERALL
Voicemails For Isabelle is a formulaically flawed but charmingly cute romantic comedy that connects instinctively with an indulging audience, courtesy not only of the accessibly enticing atmosphere from Leah McKendrick’s sophomore direction, but also the radiantly mesmerizing chemistry between Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson imbedding the necessary heart and humanity to attract an adoring audience. While the film’s familiar ingredients and comedic egregiousness leave it feeling like another of the interchangeable pack, the deeper messaging about living through grief proves the heart to be the most resilient muscle in the human anatomy, and one in which life-altering fate might just be a phone call away

My Grade: 7.3 or B-