Voicemails for Isabelle review – Netflix romcom picks creepy over cute

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Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson stumble in this mushy, overlong story of a woman leaving voicemails for her dead sister There’s a fine line between romantic comedy and creepy thriller, and while redefining the genre’s lovelorn leads as often incredibly oddball stalkers is nothing new (see the Sleepless in Seattle trailer recut as a horror movie 20 years ago), an online deluge of memes and thinkpieces have elevated post-movie bar jokes to commonly accepted theory. Some film-makers have slowly tried to catch up and capitalise – last year’s dark comedy I Love You Forever showed how epic acts of romance can be rooted in manipulation while a great deal of what makes current box office record-breaker Obsession so effective is its horror movie perversion of the day-to-day realities of all-consuming true love. Netflix’s latest romcom Voicemails for Isabelle is made with some awareness of how unsettling its premise is, as if it was originally written in the 2000s and then dusted off and tweake...
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Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

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Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

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