{"id":82595,"date":"2026-09-18T11:07:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T03:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=82595"},"modified":"2026-09-18T11:07:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T03:07:54","slug":"voicemails-for-isabelle-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=82595","title":{"rendered":"Voicemails for Isabelle (2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The film is upfront about its premise, no surprises there. But I was caught off-guard when it pulled an Up <\/em>right at the start to tug at our heartstrings. This is an old-fashioned romantic comedy and as such shamelessly falls back on many familiar tropes. But it uses them smartly in an updated context and averts those that have aged badly. It’s never going to win any awards but it’s wickedly funny, makes no missteps and sometimes this sort of back-to-basics approach is just what we need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Jill and Isabelle are sisters and best friends. As Izzy as Jill calls her was born with cystic fibrosis, she is often confined to the home and lives vicariously through the elder sister. When Izzy passes away, Jill is devastated. Unable to let her go, she starts leaving voicemails to vent about her frustrations with men and with her job as a prep cook for an abusive chef. What she doesn’t know is that the voicemails are going to the new work phone of Wes, a real estate agent in Texas. At first he listens to her voicemails for entertainment but soon grows invested in her life. After hearing her get ghosted by a podcaster following a date, Wes arranges for his work to send him to San Francisco. Using the personal information from the voicemails, he meets her at her favorite bench overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and says the right things to go out with her. Despite Jill’s insistence that she isn’t dating anyone right then, he is so charming that he gets her to fall for him and invites her to the wedding of his best friends. Everything goes perfectly until, in accordance with genre conventions, she discovers the secret of him listening to her voicemails which he isn’t quite able to bring himself to confess to, and the relationship blows up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voicemails for Isabelle<\/em> can’t top the gut punch of Up<\/em>‘s dialogue-less opening montage but it hits pretty hard all the same and effectively establishes what Izzy means to Jill. This is very much a girl power film as Jill punches out a boy for insulting Izzy, gets her own back at the sleazy podcaster and stands up to her boss. The dialogue is sharp with astutely drawn caricatures of male archetypes including the male influencer podcaster Tyler and Chef Bastien, the celebrity baker who affects being French. The jokes it sets up are hip and in tune with the times such as the tour guide for the bus tour they sign up on, who is so anxious on his first day of the job that he runs away. There are lots of amusing pop culture references though it’s a worrisome sign of my age that I don’t know Robyn at all. The references to the romcoms of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan do feel a little old. Is it reasonable to expect the characters of their age range to have watched a nearly 30-year old movie? Or perhaps it’s just that romcoms have fallen out of favor. They do serve as a good barometer of what this film is going for and it’s great at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will note that this is a female wish fulfillment fantasy. We get deep backstory about the two sisters and plenty of humanizing details about Jill. But for Wes, his one quirky trait is that he like Magic: The Gathering<\/em>? We never get to see him at work but it sure is convenient that he’s so good at it that he’s apparently rather rich. He can even step up to turn on the charm and tell jokes. So that traditional part of what makes a good boyfriend is still there. Still, I do appreciate that it updates the formula in some ways. Jill doesn’t get rescued out of her shitty job situation by Wes and it is Wes who pines for her instead of the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With no big name actors on board and no real deviations from the romcom formula, this is not award-winning material and is unlikely to be remembered. But don’t overlook this for being a solidly entertaining watch on a day when you’re not up to anything too serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The film is upfront about its premise, no surprises there. But I was caught off-guard when it pulled an Up right at the start to tug at our heartstrings. This is an old-fashioned romantic comedy and as such shamelessly falls back on many familiar tropes. But it uses them smartly in an updated context and … Continue reading Voicemails for Isabelle (2026)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82595"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82653,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82595\/revisions\/82653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}