In the setting of length PI spaces satisfying a suitable deformation property, it is known that each isoperimetric set has an open representative. In this paper, we construct an example of a length PI space (without the deformation property) where an isoperimetric set does not have any representative whose topological interior is nonempty. Moreover, we provide a sufficient condition for the validity of the deformation property, consisting in an upper Laplacian bound for the squared distance functions from a point. Our result applies to essentially nonbranching