Relay

Ash is a fixer. His work is brokering settlements between people holding documents that could destroy a corporation and the corporation itself. To protect his identity he never speaks directly: he uses the telephone relay service built for deaf users, so an operator in between reads what he types aloud to the other party. The system keeps him invisible. Then a woman asks for his protection and he breaks his own rule for the first time. David Mackenzie directed. Riz Ahmed plays Ash and Lily James the woman. The whole tension comes out of that relay. The other side never hears his voice and he never hears theirs; every sentence passes through somebody else's mouth, and the lag both slows the scenes and makes them uneasy. It opened in limited release on 22 August 2025 and went digital on 16 September. Cinemas brought in 4 million dollars. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 84 percent, with reviews calling it a return to the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the seventies. After it reached Netflix it went to number ten on the United States chart on 27 December 2025. Who it is for: viewers who like slow-building espionage that runs on procedure. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action. The film moves almost entirely on telephones and surveillance.