Relay (dir. David Mackenzie)

by Jack Martin | Nov 2, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 111 mins

UK Distributor: Black Bear Films

UK Release Date: 31 October 2025

WHO’S IN RELAY?

Riz Ahmed, Sam Worthington, Lily James, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Pun Bandhu, Eisa Davis, Matthew Maher, Seth Barrish, Victor Garber

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

David Mackenzie (director, producer), Justin Piasecki (writer), Gillian Berrie, Basil Iwanyk and Teddy Schwartzman (producers), Tony Doogan (composer), Giles Nuttgens (cinematographer), Matt Mayer (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A corporate whistleblower (James) relies on the services of a mysterious specialist (Ahmed)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON RELAY?

There’s a really, really cool idea at the core of director David Mackenzie’s Relay, one that provides a captivating update to the kind of surveillance-themed paranoia thrillers you’d often get in the 70s and 80s like The Conversation or Blow Out. In this day and age where any form of communication is more likely than not to be easily traced by the authorities, certain loopholes that benefit less-able people are used to add layer upon layer of anonymity for those willing to do dangerous yet noble things against powerful people, which adds the eerie element that the person you could be talking to through such methods could literally be anyone, even someone you may trust over everyone else.

Oddly, though, Relay takes advantage of only half that potential, nailing the basic concept but settling for narrative choices that leave it a decent add-on to an otherwise conventional thriller. Mackenzie’s film isn’t terrible, for there is a decent amount of underplayed tension that makes it perfectly watchable, but it does feel like so much more could have been done to make this film stand out.

Working from a script by Justin Piasecki, Mackenzie tells the story of Ash (Riz Ahmed), a covert fixer in New York who specialises in brokering deals between large corporations and whistleblowers threatening to turn over evidence of corruption to the press and authorities. His USP is that he communicates entirely through a relay service intended for deaf or hard-of-hearing callers, with Ash typing out the conversation onto a special device while a call operator, at a centre that deliberately holds no call records to protect users’ identity, reads out his words to the person on the other line. Soon, he is approached via the service by Sarah Grant (Lily James), who has stolen incriminating documents from the pharmaceutical company she works at that details a deadly cover-up, and needs Ash’s help to ensure that the company’s small team of counterintelligence agents, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington), are shaken off her tail so that she can return the documents while maintaining leverage against her employers.

Again, the core idea of Relay is solid, and could easily have fit alongside those earlier examples if such technology existed back then, yet Piasecki’s script doesn’t quite know how far it wants to take its own concept. While there are numerous scenes of Ahmed’s Ash typing endlessly onto the device as he communicates back and forth with his clients as well as their intimidators, there’s only so much of it one can watch before it starts to feel repetitive, even though they’re an essential part of the movie’s rather complicated plot. Mackenzie struggles to find an angle that keeps these scenes at a consistent level of suspense since, quite frankly, watching someone type for most of the movie doesn’t make for thrilling entertainment, regardless of what they may be typing.

There is also the sense of a missed opportunity in that we know right from the offset who our mysterious fixer is. While Ahmed is excellent as always in the role, Ash is a rather stock lead character for this kind of film who is going through a lot of familiar hurdles from being a recovering alcoholic to being terminally alone in a profession that doesn’t really allow for much physical interaction with others. For most of the film’s first half, he doesn’t even have any verbal dialogue, so we rarely get much insight into who he is as a character outside of what he does for a living, and even then it’s a bunch of personal issues that those like Gene Hackman in The Conversation have gone through many times before, often in much more compelling fashion. Not to tell these filmmakers what to do, but it honestly would have been more appropriate for the story and even more effective as a whole if, for the majority of the movie, we like Lily James’s Sarah and others also did not know who we were talking to this whole time, the call operator’s voice changing every time he calls and therefore preserving his identity to a point where they could have been an almost spectral presence in this tale of corporate espionage.

But although Relay doesn’t quite reach its full potential in the script department, it is still a decently made film that mines as much tension as it can get from its increasingly contrived set of events, including a third act that takes one convoluted turn too many. Mackenzie paces certain scenes with understated suspense, particularly ones wherein Ash is forced to improvise and don various disguises in order to conceal his identity when out in public, and at times there is a strong uncertainty where you’re not sure if he’s ahead of the game or if his antagonists are, as the director makes it feel as though he and other vital characters are always being watched even when they’re seemingly alone and isolated. It definitely feels as though Mackenzie is tapping into that sense of paranoia from the constant feeling of always being under surveillance, once again like The Conversation, and if the script was surer of itself to venture beyond its conventional mindset and actually deliver something that was smarter and better conceived than it actually is, Relay could have really been something special.

Instead, it’ll have to settle for being a watchable thriller with a great concept that isn’t utilised as well as it ought to have been, one where the direction and performances are all solid but also stuck with a script that, for all its promise, can’t quite relay its own ambition into the final product.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Relay is a watchable thriller that boasts a fascinating core concept which updates the classic paranoia thriller it seeks to pay homage to, but the script settles for more conventional plotting and characterisation which dilutes much of its potential.