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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‘Audiences don’t want to be challenged’: director Cristian Mungiu on exploring bigotry – and giving up film

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His Palme d’Or-winner explored abortion in his native Romania, and in RMN the director is tackling anti-immigrant sentiment head on. He explains why Europe should pay attention and whether cinema is dead

“Let us mind our words, the west is watching,” says the local mayor, hoping to calm a worked-up crowd of Transylvanian villagers. But the villagers don’t mind their words. Gathered in a packed cultural centre to vent their anger about three Sri Lankans hired by the local bakery, they are angry at everything: the closure of the nearby mine; the villagers who have left for better-paid jobs in Germany and the workload in those jobs that remain; the west’s supposed assault on the nuclear family; the hypocritical European Union. “We got rid of the gypsies,” one irate man in the crowd bellows, “and now we fight over foreigners?”

It’s just one scene from RMN, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d’Or-winning director whose work has opened up his homeland Romania to the scrutinising gaze of western European cinema audiences. When Mungiu toured the film around European festivals last year, some people in the Q&A sessions afterwards assumed that the opinions of the villagers were also his.

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