Hello and welcome back from the weekend! This letter is going out a bit later than usual because I have only just returned from a week in the mountains of North Carolina, where I treated myself to watching absolutely no new movies or TV shows. Instead I finally re-read Moby Dick for the fourth time and finished a chapbook of carefully metered poems about Siegfried Sassoon. Well, no, I actually watched tons of Below Deck (prime! Not even Mediterranean) and Law & Order: SVU and, at one friend’s adamant insistence, hours and hours of Morning Joe on MSNBC—excuse me, MSNOW. I also played cornhole and stood in a river clutching a White Claw and sat on the lawn by a campfire and watched the world go by. 

But I did not see Toy Story 5, a massive box office phenomenon that people tell me is pretty good. All that ballyhoo seemed to be happening on the other side of the Blue Ridges, out there in the real world, past where I could see. I will go to the movie eventually, though I fear being stuck in a theater with screaming kids—who, mind you, are well within their rights to scream (or, at least, make a little noise) during Toy Story 5. 

On the plane home, I took note of another sensation, a smaller and slightly quieter one, that emerged over the weekend. Meaning, I went on Twitter and Threads (a new and decidedly terrible habit) and saw that a certain cohort of young movie fans are absolutely losing their shit over Voicemails for Isabelle, a romantic dramedy starring Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson, the latter of whom I guess is acting all straight now? (I’m kidding; he acted all straight in Love, Simon, too.) I had barely even heard of the movie but all of a sudden there it was, in the number one spot on Netflix and being posted about with fervor. Upon my reentering my apartment, I called my dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day and then immediately pressed play on these intriguing Voicemails. 

There was something immediately familiar about the film’s language—its mannered quirk, its sudden zags into bawdy humor—and sure enough when I went to look up who made the film, I saw that it was Leah McKendrick, whose last film, the fertility comedy Scrambled, was in the competition the year that I was a SXSW jury member. She’s got a particularly antic approach to contemporary(ish) comedic vernacular and rhythms, caustic and sentimental at once. Which gives Voicemails plenty of energy, though it can be cringey in all its effortful clamor. 

McKendrick has come up with (though, some say she has borrowed) a perfectly sellable conceit: an aspiring chef in San Francisco, Jill (Deutch), leaves voicemails in the inbox of her dead sister’s phone number. The recipient is instead Wes (Robinson), a maybe kinda shifty real estate guy in Austin. He inherited Jill’s sister’s number and instead of immediately telling Jill that her notes are going to the wrong place (if there is any right place for them to go at this point), he listens to them, becoming so enamored of Jill’s wacky-cute vibe that he decides he has to meet her and travels across the country to do so. 

There is a deception inherent to the romance of Voicemails, as has been true of many romantic comedies, both lesser and greater, over the years—from Shakespeare or Cyrano or whatever else on. But this version of the premise feels uniquely dark; Wes is doing something akin to catfishing, using his love interest’s grief as a vector into her life, but in such a way that we in the audience can’t really tell what is genuine and what is a performance based on the information Wes has gleaned from his eavesdropping. McKendrick doesn’t want us to think about that too much, though. She makes sure that Wes is handsome and “charming” enough in his own right, suggesting that Jill would be won over even without Wes’s extra intel greasing the wheels of their romance. 

I talked to a friend about the movie after I watched it, and he said he longed for it to abruptly shift gears and morph into a thriller. That groundwork is certainly laid: Wes has invaded this ailing person’s life, exploiting a vulnerability, and it’s only a matter of time—of ticking-clock suspense—before Jill has a terrible revelation. 

But Voicemails for Isabelle is not such a movie. It is instead a sappy appeal to swoon and whimsy, full of wistful pop songs—Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” serving as the central anthem—and lots of a jokey, banter-y dialogue that often feels held over from a past movie age. I kept wondering if maybe McKendrick had dusted the script off after writing it 15 years ago, so specifically dated is its affection for “dance parties” (you know, of the performatively goofy, cool-girls-don’t-care-who’s-watching sort) and food trucks and reality TV. Nick Offerman plays an imperious chef who competed on Top Chef, a show that is still good and popular but whose broader cultural impact peaked sometime during the first Obama administration. McKendrick’s entire satire/appreciation of the food world seems rooted in that era—the movie starts in 2010 and then pretty much gets stuck there. 

Deutch, god bless her, hustles hard to sell this all this creaky, affected patter as natural, doing the yeoman’s work of grounding the film in something believable. Robinson tries too, but he’s awfully stiff in this particular mode. I don’t think that we’ve yet figured out where he best fits in the movie landscape; the best idea I can come up with is a period romance, maybe something about a WWI or II soldier. His clean-cut, medium-soft masculinity could fit nicely into that milieu. In the modern day, though—or at least in this movie—it’s hard to see him as a sensitive sweetie who is timid around women he likes. He’s even framed as something of a playboy slickster in the movie itself, with his shady business practices and modernist mansion and sharp clothes. (And, yes, seven-days-a-week gym body.) 

All that said, I did not hate my time listening to Isabelle’s voicemails. The movie looks nicer than your average streaming romcom (because it’s a Sony production, most likely) and its schematic movement from one predictable plot development to another is cozily satisfying. McKendrick may mistakenly assume that directly referencing You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally exonerates her from charges of theft—having a character say, “This is just like You’ve Got Mail” doesn’t automatically absolve you of anything. But at least the tropes she’s appropriated and repurposed prove sturdy as ever. 

I’m happy that people have taken to the movie, because I like it when people watch movies. But as we endlessly post-mortem the romcom heyday, I do yet again find myself wishing that these newly minted fans of the genre were being weaned on better food. How rash and foolish we were to take latter-day romcoms like Going the Distance for granted. Frankly, how rash and foolish some of you were for mistreating the much more recent Bros as badly as it was mistreated. (I will defend that movie forever! It’s a perfectly fun, funny, stylish film!) For the sake of optimism, though, let’s assume we are in fact building back toward a time of truly glossy, truly witty romcoms and popular slush like Voicemails for Isabelle or (ugh) Anyone but You are mere stepping stones leading the way to a golden renaissance. If that’s the case, then McKendrick’s film does its job just fine. But I really hope this is not the best we can do.