‘Relay’ Review: Riz Ahmed Gets His Own ‘Michael Clayton’ in This Fun, Twisty, and Supremely Confident Homage to Classic Paranoid Thrillers
Sharp, fun, and smartly entertaining from its first scene to its final twist, David Mackenzie’s “Relay” is an old-fashioned movie about an old-fashioned guy. The movie is a modern paranoid thriller that harkens back to the genre’s ’70s heyday (though the far more recent “Michael Clayton” might be its most obvious point of reference). The guy is an alcoholic Muslim named Ash (a sad and squirrely Riz Ahmed, fantastic throughout), who became a renegade deal broker after drinking away a more conventional life.
His stocks-in-trade are whistleblowers — he works to keep them safe from the companies who want them dead. His methods are analogue — Ash exclusively communicates with brave clients and evil conglomerates alike through a talk-to-text relay service designed to help deaf people make standard phone calls. Nobody ever hears his voice or learns his name; he hammers a message into his teleprinter, and a team of very confused (but unfailingly professional) operators then speak it to the person on the other end of the line. How to wire him $500,000. “Go ahead.” Where to leave the hyper-incriminating documents. “Go ahead.” Which newspapers he’ll send them to if the corporate goons fail to comply. “Go ahead.” That sort of thing. It’s a digital world, but Ash is able to hide in plain sight.
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In fact, Ash is so elusive that it’s something of a cat-and-mouse game just to hire him, let alone to outwit him. For much of the first half of “Relay,” in which he’s working to safeguard a frazzled new client named Sarah (Lily James) at the same time as he’s trying to throw a biotech conglomerate’s kill squad off her tail, it seems as if he’s equally busy trying to stay hidden from both sides of the deal; there’s a terrifically playful sequence in which Ash dons the first of his many disguises to lead the rest of the cast on a wild goose chase to Pittsburgh and back.
Of course, our hero’s true allegiance is no mystery, even if Sarah might think herself unworthy of his protection. Upon learning that her employer’s new wheat strain has cancerous side effects, she stole the paperwork that proved it. But when the company dispatched a crew to intimidate her into returning them (a team of memorable faces led by a prickly-great Sam Worthington, who lends the role far more personality than it demands), Sarah wilted under the pressure of their constant surveillance and agreed to give the evidence back — it’s Ash’s job to ensure that she gets to keep her life at the end of the transaction.
That’s really all there is to it, but Justin Piasecki’s knotted script absolutely delights in the process of Ash’s work, and in the gamesmanship that makes Worthington’s crew so eager to sniff him out and snipe his leverage. There’s a palpable self-assuredness to how this story allows the adversaries to circle each other like a pair of sharks who are both hungry for the same meal, and “Relay” grows all the more compelling for how it reverse-engineers a rich lead character from his appetites.
Unknowable as he might try to be (even in the AA meetings where he goes by a fake name), Ash is readily identifiable for his loneliness. It’s a loneliness crystallized by the rush of the city around him, as the same frenzy that allows him to broker deals between strangers makes it that much harder for him to form meaningful connections. Mackenzie sharpens both sides of that double-edged sword by shooting on the streets of New York with a degree of geographical fidelity that’s almost unheard of in the movies these days, as the action spans from the heart of Times Square to the bowels of The Town Hall (which is basically in Times Square, but alliteration prohibits me from using a better example), “Relay” doesn’t fake any of its locations, and so you always feel like this is just one of eight million stories that are being told across the naked city at any given moment.
It’s hard to hold onto anyone in a place so full of people, and while “Relay” may not be the deepest of texts, it displays a keen understanding of how powerful it can be for someone to cut through the noise and offer their help (it’s telling that Ash’s only friend is his sponsor, and “friend” might be a generous word for it). In essence, that’s the service Ash provides to his clients, and — as we start to gather from the way he smiles at Sarah through the floor-to-ceiling window of her Tribeca safehouse — he’s desperate for his latest client to return the favor. It’s a bit implausible how fast she begins fantasizing what his face might look like and things like that, but that’s all part of the story’s charm, and the movie knows what it’s doing.
David Mackenzie movies usually do. A singular journeyman who never makes the same film twice, Mackenzie has directed a shattering prison drama (“Starred Up”), an Oscar-nominated neo-Western (“Hell or High Water”), and a medieval epic (“Outlaw King”) in the last 11 years alone, and the only readily identifiable commonalities between his work are their shared focus on male isolation — often in the midst of chaos — and the visceral intelligence of their construction, which he will bring to the surface even if it means tinkering with a project after its festival debut. It could be argued that he has a semi-consistent tendency to rely on fluid and fast-moving handheld camerawork, but Mackenzie’s approach to style is always subservient to the story he’s telling.
Case in point: “Relay” is shot with a cool and slinky confidence that allows it to emphasize the legibility of its plot without making any of its moving parts too obvious, and while the movie leaves all sorts of “cool” points on the table for not pursuing a more aggressively stylized aesthetic, Mackenzie’s down-and-dirty approach keeps the film in line with its forebears while allowing it the flexibility to stage major sequences in full view of the public. Like Ash, the movie is arresting and invisible all at once. Besides, the plot itself proves twisty enough that any gratuitous flourishes would have felt too much like gilding the lily.
Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment at a time when corporations would rather kill a single whistleblower than spare the lives of 1,000 customers, and it pulls that off with expert precision. David Mackenzie will never make another movie like this of course, but in the unlikely event the idea crosses his mind I’d only have one thing to say in response: Go ahead.
Grade: B+
“Relay” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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