Monday new releases: 25 August 2025

Eddington, Relay and Workmates are in cinemas.

Correction: In Friday’s newsletter, I said that Gut Instinct was a New Zealand exclusive rental release on AroVision. Within moments, AroVision’s Andrew Armitage reached out to let me know that it is actually a worldwide AroVision exclusive. That’s right, no geoblocking from anywhere on the planet. Here’s a link to the Gut Instinct page at AroVision and the service has apps so you can screen their rentals on your home TV.

We’ve had houseguests this weekend so trips to the cinema for new releases have been somewhat restricted. Indeed, even finding common ground on the two new features that have dropped on streamers proved impossible. I showed the trailers for Eenie Meanie (Disney+) and Night Will Fall (Netflix) to the assembly but neither felt enough like Saturday night fare and we ended up watching the new 4K restoration of Coppola’s The Conversation on UHD disc instead.

Despite being over 50 years old instead of brand spanking new, the classic paranoid thriller got the thumbs up from everyone and prompted plenty of debate and requests watch the DVD extras.

The Conversation turned out to be in conversation, if you like, with a film we did get to see in cinemas on Saturday, David Mackenzie’s Relay. Similarly occupied by secrets, surveillance, trust and betrayal, Relay’s first two-thirds is about as good as modern thrillers get. If your favourite bits of spy movies is the attention to detail of tradecraft, then you’ll be in clover like I was. The film’s title comes from the Tri-State Relay Service, a way for the hard-of-hearing to have telephone conversations involving a third party speaking and transcribing the conversation between two people. “Go ahead.”

Riz Ahmed’s secretive corporate fixer uses it to hide everything about his identity as he negotiates the return of sensitive documents that have been stolen by whistleblowers who subsequently get cold feet. Indeed, for the first half of the film he doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, suggesting he might be playing another deaf character, as he did when he blew us all away as the rock drummer in Sound of Metal (2019).

He’s engaged by a terrified Lily James, who is in possession of a report accusing her former genetic crop modifier employers of producing toxic wheat. They’ve been making threats and now she wants to return the report and make the whole problem go away. But, she knows what she knows, and Ahmed’s Ash has the only solution that can keep her safe. But keeping these dangerous secrets secret puts millions of others at risk — from poisonous food products to unsafe pharmaceuticals — and is starting to eat away at his own conscience.

The premise and execution of the first two acts is so good that it shouldn’t be surprising that the conclusion doesn’t quite measure up. Endings are hard. But Relay is still one of the tightest and most satisfying thrillers of the year.

There’s a shot near the finale of Relay which shows Ahmed in the back of a New Jersey police car with the slogan, “Trust. Integrity. Partnership.” stuck on the side. It’s a helpful guide to the themes of the film, I suppose, if a bit on the nose, but it’s not the only example this week. In Ari Aster’s Eddington, Joaquin Phoenix’s small town sheriff turned mayoral candidate festoons his work vehicle with political slogans and the one he’s seen in front of most often reads “YOUR BEING MANIPULATED”. He’s dead right, of course, but the manipulator-in-chief is Mr. Aster himself.

Eddington is a fictional small town in New Mexico — actually portrayed by the wonderfully named Truth or Consequences — and Aster intends it to be a kind of microcosm of fractious United States society in the 2020s.

The film is set in May 2020. Covid is spreading around the world, thousands of people are dying, there is no vaccine and the only protection against the spread are the deeply inconvenient impositions on personal freedom that were masking mandates, social distancing and lockdowns.

The virus hasn’t arrived yet in Eddington¹ but the restrictions have and Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross butts heads with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over how to enforce them. We learn that the pair have history between them. In fact, everyone in the town seems to have history, as each character is used by Aster to represent some aspect of American disfunctionality.

It’s said that comedy equals tragedy plus time but, not only are we not far enough away from these events for Aster’s cynical detachment to be amusing, the fractures he is portraying for laughs aren’t even over. Trump’s second ascendancy, political assassinations over vaccine mandates², terrorist attacks on the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta³ are all signs that we can’t treat the Covid period as “what a crazy time that was, what were we thinking?” because we are still dealing with the fallout every day.

Even here in New Zealand, on my way to the Eddington screening at the festival, I saw a billboard arguing for retribution against politicians, scientists, statisticians, epidemiologists and other public servants who did their best to keep us safe.

But Coronavirus is just the first salvo in Aster’s “state of the nation”. Cryptocurrency, conspiracy theories, personal growth grifters are all featured (but without any deeper analysis of how and why people are being so easily manipulated and by whom). The most disappointing element, though, is his treatment of the Black Lives Matter movement — George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in May 2020, sparking protests across the country and Aster finds amusement in the students of Eddington taking to the streets in ‘allyship’.