Voicemails for Isabelle ends with Jill discovering that Wes secretly heard all her intimate voicemails to her late sister after her number was reassigned to his work phone. Feeling betrayed, she cuts him off and focuses on healing, using Isabelle’s college fund to start a dessert and breakfast taco food truck that honours their shared memories and helps her process her grief independently.
If you’ve been mourning the quality of romcoms in Netflix lately, Voicemails for Isabelle is your fix. On the surface, it is a romantic comedy built around one of the more cliched meet-cute premises in recent streaming memory: a grieving woman keeps calling her dead sister's old phone number, not realising the number has been reassigned to a stranger who has been listening to every word. That stranger, naturally, falls in love with her (oh hi, Priyanka Chopra’s Love Again). It’s all tropes you’ve seen play out a hundred times on your screens, but the brilliance and ease with which the two leads carry it to the end really throw you off guard. Here is a full breakdown of everything that happens in the closing stretch, and how it ends the way it does.
For the film's first two acts, Jill is under the impression that her relationship with Wes developed the way most relationships do: gradually, through conversation and proximity. But this can’t be any further from the truth.
When her sister Isabelle died, her phone number was reassigned to Wes as a work device. Every voicemail Jill left for her late sister found its way to him instead: confessions about career failures, descriptions of her dream guy and the unprocessed grief she was still working through. He fell in love with her through those messages, and used the information from these voicemails to be more appealing to her.
The truth surfaces at the worst possible time: Andy and Breeda's wedding (quite the ironic place, I would say). As Jill tries to leave yet another message for Isabelle, Wes' phone rings with a ringtone she immediately recognises. Jill walks out and refuses to hear him out.
The knowledge that he heard dozens of them, knew her intimately before they had a single real conversation, and said nothing about it crushes her, and cuts off contact entirely.
Of course, like any good romcom hero, Wes broods, pines and keeps telling his friends that Jill will never forgive him. Later, when an iOS update wipes all of Isabelle's saved voicemails from Jill's phone, he moves to recover them and ensures she retains access to the number. Jill, meanwhile, has already lost her job at the famous chef’s, and with her relationship in shambles and her final contact with her sister gone, she has now lost the one tool that helped her manage her grief.
And now, as Wes waits, Jill moves forward. Having already quit her job working under a high-profile chef, she uses the time apart to make a decision she had been circling around for the entire film. Her parents give her money from Isabelle's unused college fund, and with it, she buys a food truck centred on desserts and breakfast tacos: dishes she and her sister loved together. She also brings on a former colleague to help run it. Honestly, it’s a welcome change from the heroine being miserable after the breakup trope.
By the time New Year's Eve arrives, Jill has moved on. She also discovers that Isabelle's voicemails have been restored to her phone. And with it is a voicemail from Wes: genuinely apologetic, with no conditions attached, inviting her to meet him at Jose’s for breakfast tacos at midnight.
Wes is convinced she will not come. His friends push him there regardless. He finds Jill already inside, eating tacos, having made her decision before he walked through the door. He tells her what he feels, and the two reconcile with a final kiss.
In the closing minutes, Wes records a voicemail addressed directly to Isabelle, asking for her blessing as he and Jill prepare to move in together. Jill, stepping away from the food truck briefly, sends what she frames as her final message to her sister. She tells Isabelle she no longer needs the calls as a crutch. She accepts that her sister will always be with her in a different form. She tells her she has found a good man in Wes.
The moment Wes asks out loud for a sign, the sister's favourite song comes on the radio. The two of them dance to it as the movie draws to a close.