Relay

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.

Relay proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

A thriller worth watching; it's worth sticking with it and not being put off. The story weakens a bit from the middle onwards. Overall, less CGI and more traditional effects would have benefited the film. But despite that, it's a thriller highlight of the year.

(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.

It starts off as the kind of thriller that easily hooks you: a modern spy thriller, a whistleblower theme, and tension that builds gradually, even with a few clichés along the way. It works. And it works well for the most **** get drawn into the story, buy into the premise, and stay engaged, hoping everything will come together in the end. But then the film decides to bite off more than it can chew and stumbles badly.That plot twist comes out of nowhere, with no build-up and no logic, clearly more interested in shocking than in making sense. Instead of elevating the story, it destroys everything that had been built **** the end, it’s an effective thriller that sabotages itself. Because when the film decides to surprise, it simply loses its way.

A slightly above average film due to Ahmed’s acting and the novel use of the Relay system to create a clever subterfuge. The twist in the plot is way too easy to guess early on, and thus the impact of the film is diminished. James’ acting at the finale is quite poor, and most of the other actors are average to poor throughout. I doubt I’d watch it again.

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.