As directors go, David Mackenzie always struck me as someone who refused to drift through genre on autopilot. Hell or High Water was a jolt to the “modern Western” in the way an electric current perks up a tired body—full of sunbaked grit and genuine desperation. So it’s almost a perverse accomplishment that Relay, despite carrying all the trappings of a high-concept, glossy paranoia thriller, manages to take the zeitgeist by the throat and promptly doze off. You can practically hear the film’s pulse rate dropping as the credits roll.
There’s an argument to be made that the first half of Relay sustains a certain intrigue—the shadow play of whistleblowers, surveillance teams, duplicity piled atop duplicity, all delivered with a technological twist (the protagonist, Ash, played by Riz Ahmed, keeps his identity hidden through a relay service for the deaf). That’s fresh territory, and at moments there’s a flavor of those 1970s chillers, The Conversation or Three Days of the Condor—the shiver of phone booths, the chill of being watched. If only Mackenzie had held onto even a shred of their nervy intelligence and prickly suspense. At the halfway mark, something unspoken breaks—the tension, perhaps, or just the common thread of sense. The movie slips out of our hands, and we’re left watching the pieces bounce, one by one, onto linoleum.
There’s something almost mournful in seeing such a cast so underused. Riz Ahmed, with his usual offbeat intensity, manages to carve out a figure who would have been at home in a better, sharper movie—a man always on the edge, both hunted and haunted. Lily James offers more than the script deserves as Sarah Grant, her eyes darting with real fear and defiance. Yet, for all the talk of whistleblowing and moral compromise, the film’s script gives them only cardboard to chew. Sam Worthington and Willa Fitzgerald, meanwhile, are relegated to moving furniture: their characters make so little impression you wonder if someone forgot to write them in, or if—budgetarily speaking—it would have sufficed to cast anonymous extras in their stead.
But the real crime Relay commits is cinematic: Mackenzie, whose past work buzzed with urgency, here ties one hand behind his own back. The tension melts, the intrigue evaporates, and suddenly even the film’s twist—a supposed gotcha so telegraphed you can see it limping towards you all the way from act two—comes not as a shock, but a resignation. The resolution isn’t explosive, just scattered. There’s no sense of payoff, just a tumble of revelations and reversals, none of which feel as though they have been earned. By the time the climax whimpers into view, we’re left with an unpolished mess masquerading as closure; it doesn’t thrill, and it certainly doesn’t haunt.
It’s worth asking: why does a movie with all the right ingredients—the director, the cast, the premise—end up feeling like stale leftovers? Relay seems desperate to be about something: the costs of secrecy, the dangers of unchecked power. Yet it confuses incessant plot-shuffling for depth and tension. Instead of shining a light on the moral rot at the root of corporate and government overreach, the film’s grasp on reality loosens as the stakes escalate. The whole enterprise is oddly passionless, like a dinner party where everyone arrived late and forgot why they were there.
Mackenzie cites the paranoia thrillers of the 1970s as influences, but what he borrows is purely the scaffolding—telephone lines and tailing cars, not the bone-deep unease or mournful surveillance-state poetry those films conjured. Here, paranoia fizzles into mere confusion. The only “nightmare” version we get is that of a good story sabotaged by ham-fisted mechanics.
What stings isn’t that Relay fumbles its twist, but that it abandons the very things that could have made it not just watchable, but resonant: nuanced characters, palpable stakes, and a director willing to probe the anxious heart beneath the genre’s trappings. This isn’t a case of fatal compromise—it’s a case of a good story left mangled at the bottom of a rewrite, with nobody around to perform CPR.
A thriller, I suppose, should leave you short of breath, not checking your pulse to see if there’s any life left. Relay is, regrettably, a relay race where someone dropped the baton halfway through—and then forgot where the finish line was.
