Leah McKendrick says Voicemails for Isabelle was built from life, not just imagination, and the timing makes that clear. The Netflix romantic comedy is now streaming, and FlixPatrol has it at No. 1 on the platform, giving her mix of grief, romance and sisterhood a very public audience.
McKendrick said the first seed was planted more than seven years ago at a comedy club, when a roommate performed a set about her father's long, rambling voicemails. Then another comic answered with a line that stuck: “It's so nice that your dad calls you. My dad hasn't called me in three years.” She followed it with the punch line that changed the room, revealing, “He's dead.” For McKendrick, that moment became proof that private pain can arrive dressed as a joke, and that was part of the emotional engine behind the film.
She also said her sister moved to New York to attend college, while McKendrick was left in Hollywood leaving long, rambling voicemails about how hard it was to make it in the city and how it did not want her. Those calls, along with a later period of grim contemplation, fed the script. In the film, Zoey Deutch plays Jill, a novice baker in San Francisco who keeps leaving detailed voicemails for her dead sister Isabelle, played as the sibling she cannot let go of.
That is where the film’s pull comes from. Jill’s messages are funny, needy and painfully specific, and they sit beside loss instead of trying to dodge it. Nick Robinson’s Wes, a realtor who hears the voicemails and falls for Jill, helps turn the story from pure mourning into something messier and more human. McKendrick’s own line about the material captures the joke and the wound at once: if someone heard her most unfiltered self, it could be a horror story, but if someone fell in love with that self, it would be real.
Deutch was not eager to return to romcoms after 2018’s Set it Up, but she said she signed on because this one felt deep and about grief, love after loss and sisters. That hesitation fits the film’s odd balance: it wants the lightness of a romantic comedy, yet it is powered by the kind of loss that does not vanish just because the scene changes. The question now is not whether the movie has a clear hook. It does. The question is how much of McKendrick’s real life viewers will hear in Jill’s voicemails as the film keeps climbing on Netflix.
