'Relay' is a smart throwback thriller for our times
Riz Ahmed plays a fixer navigating the world of corporate espionage
There are many movies about whistleblowers who do the right thing, who withstand enormous pressure from the powerful and well-connected to reveal their wrongdoing to the world.
“Relay” is not about those people. It’s about the people who crack under pressure.
As such, the smart political thriller by David Mackenzie (“Hell of High Water”) seems distressingly tuned in to the bleak present moment, when oligarchs feel they’ve earned the right to reshape the world and the lives of ordinary people to their liking with impunity.
On such an unequal playing field, Ash (Riz Ahmed) at least has found a way to make a unique kind of living. He works as a middleman between would-be whistleblowers who have changed their minds about going public, and the powerful corporations who want their secrets back. Ash negotiates the return of any documents, gets an under-the-table settlement for the former employee, and everything is swept under the rug.
When Ash uses his deep knowledge of obscure postal regulations to outwit his opponents, I knew “Relay” was my kind of movie.
Ahmed plays Ash as a man living in the shadows, so much so that Ahmed astonishingly doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in the first 28 minutes of “Relay.” (I timed it.) Instead, we watch as he quietly goes about his work, and screenwriter Justin Piasecki shows us the fascinating lengths Ash will go to keep himself invisible through fraught negotiations.
That includes communicating with both parties through a relay service, where operators facilitate phone calls for people who have hearing disabilities. Ash types what he wants to say into a terminal, and the operator reads it aloud to the person on the other end of the phone. It’s a nifty cinematic device that illustrates how protected and closed off Ash is from the world. Even the middleman has middlemen.
Ash has a new client when “Relay” opens, an agricultural scientist named Sarah (Lily James) who discovers that her biotech firm’s new strain of insect-resistant wheat has serious side effects. Sarah’s company is playing rough – her car was set on fire and she was forced to go into hiding – and, terrified, she just wants to give the incriminating documents back.
The company’s “representatives,” including Sam Worthington (“Avatar”) and Willa Fitzgerald (“Strange Darling”) are a clever and ruthless bunch. It’s really fun to watch Ash and the corporate enforcers try to outmaneuver each other, a cat-and-mouse game across New York City involving dead drops, clandestine messages and the occasional disguise. When Ash uses his deep knowledge of obscure postal regulations to outwit his opponents, I knew “Relay” was my kind of movie.
Ash keeps himself protected through a series of rigid rules and procedures. So, of course, in the tradition of “The Conversation” or “Someone To Watch Over Me,” he starts bending and then breaking those rules as he starts forming a personal connection with Sarah. James isn’t given much to work with as Sarah, but Ahmed expertly reveals the insecurities and loneliness beneath Ash’s cool-customer exterior.
After being such a savvy thriller that trusts in the audience’s intelligence, “Relay” unfortunately slips into generic action-movie cliches in the climax. It’s like if “Michael Clayton” had ended with Michael Clayton being chased by goons with guns through a warehouse.
It’s a surprising failure of nerve for a film that had been so confident and poised for most of its running time, and keeps “Relay” from being a truly great thriller instead of a good one.
“Relay” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace and AMC Fitchburg 18.