David Mackenzie’s Relay is a rare kind of modern thriller: coolly intelligent, quietly unnerving, and built on ideas rather than explosions. It unfolds in a version of New York that feels both contemporary and haunted by the ghosts of older conspiracy films. At the center of it all is Riz Ahmed, giving one of his most quietly magnetic performances as Ash, a professional go-between who makes a living brokering deals between whistle-blowers and the corporations they threaten to expose. It’s an ethically ambiguous job, and the film never lets him or the audience forget it.
The concept is simple but ingenious. Ash uses an old assistive communication system, a phone relay service originally designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as his cover. It allows him to pass information between opposing parties while concealing his own identity. He is a middleman of secrets, a man who thrives in the murky space between truth and silence. When Sarah Grant, played by Lily James, contacts him with evidence implicating a powerful biotech firm, Ash finds himself drawn into a dangerous transaction that blurs the professional detachment he depends on. What begins as a routine exchange for cash and confidentiality gradually evolves into a crisis of conscience.
Mackenzie’s direction emphasizes procedure and mood rather than spectacle. Much of the film’s tension comes from the choreography of communication: phone calls made in public spaces, quiet exchanges in diners, coded language that hints at the stakes without ever spelling them out. There are no car chases or massive gunfights. Instead, the film’s energy lies in surveillance, suspicion, and the anxiety of being watched. Mackenzie, who previously directed Hell or High Water and Outlaw King, proves adept at sustaining unease through restraint. He trusts silence as much as dialogue, and that patience pays off.
Ahmed’s performance is the film’s backbone. His Ash is calm and deliberate, yet visibly burdened by a history he can’t shake. The character’s trade demands emotional distance, but the actor reveals a flicker of guilt beneath the surface. Even when he’s doing nothing, simply listening, thinking, waiting, there’s a sense of internal conflict flickering across his face. Lily James, meanwhile, gives Sarah an intriguing mix of resolve and vulnerability. She’s not a saintly whistle-blower; she’s scared, unsure, and human, which makes her moral choices more believable. The uneasy chemistry between the two characters becomes one of the film’s most compelling threads.
Visually, Relay is cold but beautiful. The cinematography favors muted tones, dimly lit interiors, and wide shots that make the characters look small against the vast machinery of the city. Every frame reinforces Ash’s isolation. The camera often keeps him partially obscured, framed through windows, reflected in glass, or separated from others by walls. The effect mirrors the film’s central idea that communication can be both a bridge and a barrier. The sound design deepens that tension: distant chatter, background hums, and electronic interference create an atmosphere where every noise feels like a possible threat.
What distinguishes Relay from most corporate thrillers is its understanding of how technology shapes human behavior. The relay phone system isn’t just a plot device; it’s a metaphor for modern distance and moral disconnection. The film asks whether anonymity protects people or corrupts them. Ash’s job depends on staying invisible, but invisibility also erodes his sense of self. In several key scenes, he seems almost to dissolve into the systems he operates, a man becoming more interface than person.
Still, for all its intelligence and craft, Relay isn’t flawless. Its deliberate pacing, so effective in the first hour, starts to drag in the third act. As the story expands into larger conspiracies and violent confrontations, the film risks losing the precision that made it gripping. The final twenty minutes flirt with more conventional thriller beats, a chase, a twist revelation, a moral reckoning, that feel slightly less inspired than what came before. Mackenzie seems torn between finishing on a cerebral note and delivering the kind of closure audiences expect. The result is satisfying but not transcendent.
The screenplay, written by Mackenzie and Justin Piasecki, occasionally struggles to balance character depth with procedural detail. Ash is drawn with nuance, but some supporting figures, especially the corporate antagonists, verge on archetype. The dialogue is crisp and economical, yet a few emotional beats, particularly between Ash and Sarah, feel rushed. Their connection is more thematic than romantic, representing two people forced into empathy by circumstance, but the film hints at deeper intimacy without fully earning it.
Even so, Relay succeeds where it counts. Its atmosphere of paranoia feels freshly relevant in an era when information is both currency and weapon. The film doesn’t lecture or moralize; instead, it lets its mechanics express its ideas. Every scene demonstrates the uneasy truth that in a connected world, trust is the most fragile commodity. The people in Relay spend their lives exchanging data but rarely make genuine contact. The irony is painful and profound.
Comparisons to classics like The Conversation or Michael Clayton are inevitable, but Mackenzie isn’t merely imitating those films, he’s updating them. He trades the analog paranoia of wiretaps and typewriters for a digital unease built around encryption, mediation, and disembodied communication. The influence is clear, yet the execution feels distinctly modern. There’s a quiet sadness in how the film sees technology as both enabler and destroyer, offering connection while ensuring alienation.
By the time the credits roll, Relay leaves the viewer uneasy in the best way. It’s not a film about solving mysteries so much as about living with them, the mysteries of other people’s motives, of compromised morality, of how easily the truth can be lost in translation. Ahmed’s final scenes carry a kind of tragic calm: a man who understands that doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee redemption, only exposure.
Despite its imperfections, Relay stands out as one of the year’s most thoughtful thrillers. It manages to combine tension with introspection, and even when its plot falters, its atmosphere never does. Mackenzie’s direction, Ahmed’s performance, and the film’s haunting sense of moral ambiguity make it linger long after it ends. It’s the sort of story that rewards patience and close attention, not because of what it shows, but because of what it withholds. In an age of noise, Relay dares to whisper, and that makes it all the more gripping.
Relay will be available to own on Blu-ray on 10/28!
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