People Are Saying This Viral Netflix Rom-Com Is 'Creepy' - Are They Right?

From holding boomboxes outside of houses to writing 365 letters, romance movies tell us a lot about love and devotion. But where’s the line between cute and downright creepy? A recent Netflix movie that toes this line to the extreme is the viral Voicemails for Isabelle. 

Starring Nick Robinson and Zoey Deutch, the film centres on Jill (Deutch), a pastry chef based in San Francisco who leaves impassioned voicemails for her deceased sister on her old number. When real estate agent Wes (Robinson) inherits this number, he finds himself falling in love with the woman behind these chaotic voicemails. 

So, he does what any normal guy would and decides to orchestrate a meet-cute and exploit everything he knows about her to be the perfect boyfriend. Romantic, right…? Wrong. Even if the internet as a whole is inclined to gloss over this horrific violation of boundaries, some aren’t entirely sold on this premise. And honestly? Neither am I.

Why Are People Criticising Voicemails For Isabelle?

While Voicemails for Isabelle holds an 87% ‘Fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, multiple reviewers have called out the premise. Variety summed up the movie as being “like Sleepless In Seattle with considerably more boundary violations,” adding that, despite the movie’s best efforts, “you can’t quite forget that unnerving business with the voicemails.”

The Guardian notes that writer-director Leah McKendrick “tries to have it both ways, poking fun at the weirdness of her meet-cute while also expecting us to bask in the basic, hot chocolate pleasures of it.”

However, reviewer Benjamin Lee highlights how “merely pointing out the uneasiness of Wes’ behaviour does not magically make it any less uneasy.”

In addition to this, The Wrap says in its review that “if Wes got what was coming to him every time he did something creepy he’d be an unrecognisable bruise in the shape of a human by the end of this movie.”

And The New York Times, in turn, compares the movie to a 1999 article from the satirical website The Onion entitled: Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested. 

Moreover, despite there being a lot of love for the movie on social media, there has also been heated discourse about it, too. One TikToker described the movie as “creepy and stalkerish,” while another, in a clip that has amassed over 1 million views, said: "Everyone’s talking about Voicemails for Isabelle but I’d highkey be terrified if a man stalked me to my city and used info I shared with my deceased sister to be close to me.”

Similarly, on X, one user described the film as “a creepy problematic movie wearing rose coloured glasses.” 

“This man literally stalked her, used her voicemails to make her fall for him and he is supposed to be a green flag because he recovered the voicemails for her??” they asked. “Ew! That is not love!!”

A second X user points out how Wes “learns intimate details about her life, her routines, her pain, and her vulnerabilities. Then he uses that information to work his way into her world.”

 “And somehow I’m supposed to find this romantic?” they asked. 

What Are The Movie’s Defenders Saying?

On the other side of it all, Slate journalist Heather Schwedel provides a more nuanced approach. “It would indeed be a huge violation to use essentially the same sort of phone-hacking methods that once brought down a UK tabloid to get a girl to like you in real life,” she writes. “In Voicemails for Isabelle, it works, because of both the script and Deutch’s winning presence selling it.”

She goes on to note how, contrary to some vocal dissenters, the movie is largely popular with viewers. “The audience was able to see that the core of the story is Jill and Isabelle’s relationship and not get too bogged down in the whole voicemails thing,” she adds. “For once, I have hope for the future of media literacy.”

Meanwhile, multiple TikTokers shifted the emphasis onto the sisterly bond between Jill and Isabelle. “Everyone watched it as a romance, I watched it as a sister,” one TikToker said, while a second insisted that “the true love story was Jill and Izzy because no man could ever replace the bond between sisters.” 

Who Is Right?

Sure, the movie has its fun moments, and the bond between Izzy and Jill is definitely a highlight of the film, but ultimately, I just can’t get past the whole voicemail thing. While encroaching boundaries and the ‘persistent pursuer’ trope is hardly new in romance movies, there’s something incredibly sinister and sneaky about how Wes doesn’t just listen to the voicemails, but how he uses them to, in my opinion, manipulate Jill’s reality when she was at her lowest. 

This is very different from, say, Heath Ledger singing to Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You. The former requires deceit and manipulation, while the latter is an ultimately harmless and thoroughly entertaining grand gesture. 

Acknowledging that Wes’ behaviour is messed up in this movie doesn’t mean that, like Slate suggests, I’m devoid of all media literacy. I completely appreciate that, when it comes to romance movies, we are meant to suspend our beliefs about reality a little. But Wes’ actions are just too creepy to let slide. The truth is, the audience are letting Wes get away with it because he’s conventionally attractive, and because, quite frankly, the bar is in hell.

The whole purpose of TV shows like You is to convey to people that conventionally attractive, obsessive men aren’t cute — they can actually be dangerous. In my opinion, Wes’ actions in this movie seem more aligned with Joe and his trusty anonymising cap than a rom-com lead. Failing to differentiate between what is romantic and what is downright weird, or, even worse, praising men for this kind of behaviour is the true mark of lacking in media literacy.

 In the immortal words of Abby Lee Miller, have you, the audience, learned nothing?!

As an audience, we’ve learned and grown a lot since the golden age of rom-coms. Our understanding of boundaries and what counts as acceptable behaviour has fundamentally shifted, especially in this era of therapy-speak and the TikTokification of terms like attachment style and boundaries. So, it’s possible that Voicemails for Isabelle isn’t that different from all these other rom-coms. Maybe we are the ones who have changed. 

Still, I maintain that even if the most iconic romantic heroes’ grand gestures are eyebrow-raising if we look at them again today, they aren’t as weird as inserting yourself into the life of a grieving women after hearing deeply personal voicemails that weren’t even meant for you in the first place. And sorry, Nick Robinson, but that applies even to you.