X
- 2025
- R
- Bleecker Street Media
- 1 h 52 m
- 2025
- R
- Bleecker Street Media
- 1 h 52 m
Summary A broker of lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten them breaks his own rules when a new client seeks his protection to stay alive.
Directed By: David Mackenzie
Written By: Justin Piasecki
- 2025
- R
- Bleecker Street Media
- 1 h 52 m
- 2025
- R
- Bleecker Street Media
- 1 h 52 m
Relay
70
6.2
Where to Watch
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Summary A broker of lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten them breaks his own rules when a new client seeks his protection to stay alive.
Directed By: David Mackenzie
Written By: Justin Piasecki
Where to Watch
Coming Soon
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable Based on 28 Critic Reviews
70
71% Positive
20 Reviews
20 Reviews
29% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable Based on 28 Critic Reviews
70
71% Positive
20 Reviews
20 Reviews
29% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Aug 19, 2025
Like the best of its genre, it affords tantalizing entrée into a universe lurking just below society’s surface to which few are privy, and stages engrossing cloak-and-dagger games between players who know the rules and, more dangerously, how to break them.
Aug 26, 2025
Relay proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 34 User Ratings
6.2
59% Positive
20 Ratings
20 Ratings
29% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
12% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 34 User Ratings
6.2
59% Positive
20 Ratings
20 Ratings
29% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
12% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
Aug 25, 2025
Riz Ahmed has an unusual job in this film: He brokers payoff deals between corporations with something to hide and the person who has secrets that could bring them down. He keeps everything anonymous but using a relay service for the hearing impaired. Along comes a desperate new client (Lily James) and the clandestine operation begins. This film unfolds with slow, steady stress, as we watch the machinations he goes thru to solve the conflict, while protecting both sides. It’s kinda like watching a spy thriller play out on the streets of NYC. With his easy intensity, Ahmed makes every moment count and James effectively plays the damsel in distress. Director David Mackenzie has the ability to create low-grade tension in almost every exchange and it keeps mounting until the final showdown. Between the continually-clever cloak-and-dagger situations, effective performances and Mackenzie’s skillful craft, the film is a quietly involving paranoid thriller with a bit of character study to add humanity.
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Sep 13, 2024
Mackenzie and his cast dance around and through this drama so elegantly and delicately that the twisty, generic ending feels like even more of a letdown than it might have in a more ordinary picture. The details are not worth getting into, but Relay is the rare movie where I might recommend leaving ten minutes before the end.
Aug 21, 2025
Relay, a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness.
Aug 22, 2025
This is a good movie. But it seems to be at odds with itself. And if you think back over how the story was set up and how it built towards its final section, you may conclude that it doesn’t quite play fair.
Sep 13, 2024
The subdued carefulness of the buildup gives way to rote, poorly staged action and a twist that might fill in a few plot-holes but leaves us otherwise dissatisfied.
Aug 21, 2025
This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.
Nov 4, 2025
(Mauro Lanari) "In the first thirty minutes of 'Relay,' it almost feels like Ahmed is playing the protagonist from 'Sound of Metal' again": true. "It harks back to '70s paranoid conspiracy films from 'Three Days of the Condor' to 'The Conversation'": seriously? It's an anti-corporate genre movie with a robust story, direction, and acting. Its main flaw is the concluding twist, predictable due to the miscasting.
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Sep 27, 2025
Emotional connection in a material world. How fiction betrays you when you take a peak behind the curtain. There's something to be said about how analog still fills the gap that digital cannot. Riz ahmed very much embodies this thematic strand. There's another thematic strand, more interesting which is pulsating throughout the film which is this danger of giving into your emotions and letting it override one's professionalism and how maintaining a certain distance, (in a voyeuristic manner) protects you, as long as you keep that distance. It's "officially" not a Post-9/11 work but it belongs to that period of paranoia, it has the aesthetics of the bourne movies, as well as the feel of mid-2000s despite actually not taking place in that time. It functions like a spy thriller, full of tense cat & mouse sequences filled with misdirections and sleight of hand moments. Riz ahmed keeps his distance from lilly james which allows for most of the mechanics to work. It's not long before this tension turns into lust as they get close and he gets out of his voyeuristic safe distance and the film starts to feel like Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' with both of the actors getting more and more desperate to unite. It manages to have some that entrancing spell of Vertigo, at least until it gets very dumb with the cynical and misanthropic twist which is nonsensical and an ending which is wishful thinking at best. Ahmed's illusory savior complex is **** but he gets away with a slap on the wrist with a cynical moral lesson. Almost 80% of this film is really good but the bad 20% is really bad, the stupid twist really sours the best moments - Lilly james as a criminal mastermind, pretending to be a lonely woman is laughable and hardly convincing. But for once, riz ahmed is playing a normal guy in a spy thriller and not some invincible, badass **** archetype.
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Sep 18, 2025
The film slowly builds up like a classic conspiracy thriller, then goes off the cliff with a script that couldn't quite figure out how to wrap things up. A "love story" is forced in and makes zero sense, leading up to a third act that just crashes into the ground, undoing the buildup before it. Mackenzie is a great director, and he does his best with the material. And the cast including Riz (who is slightly miscast here, thanks to the poorly done "romance" angle that was forced in) are great. But the story simply can't hold things together as it edges towards a very silly finish.
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Production Company
- Black Bear
- Sigma Films
- Thunder Road Pictures
Release Date Aug 22, 2025
Duration 1 h 52 m
Rating R
Tagline No callers are identified. No conversations are recorded. No phone records are kept. Now speak clearly and when you are finished say: 'Go ahead'
