Director David Mackenzie has had a fascinating career; in the past, we’d likely consider him a talented journeyman, the sort of solid professional who can churn out good, if occasionally impersonal, work (these directors tend to gravitate toward prestige television nowadays). Some readers might recall Mackenzie’s stunning debut, 2003’s Young Adam, or the underrated 2009 Ashton Kutcher vehicle Spread, a “vulgar auteurist” favorite. He’s never made anything quite that galvanizing again, as he has jumped from genre to genre and even dipped his toes into the streaming maw. Hell or High Water likely remains his best-known work, and his new film Relay functions in a similar way: a sleek, handsome thriller with some nods to “how we live now.” It’s not quite the paranoid classic it aspires toward, but it’s so propulsive you might not care.
Working from a screenplay by Justin Piasecki, Relay follows the mysterious Ash (Riz Ahmed). He’s a sort of go-between fixer that assists whistleblowers who are being threatened by the corporate interests they hope to expose. Ash has perfected an extremely precise system of communication with his clients that protects his identity and allows him to communicate details while avoiding high-tech cyber surveillance. In other words, he’s an analog figure in a digital world, a dynamic that fuels much of the film’s subtextual interest.
The plot proper kicks in when Sarah (Lily James) decides that she desperately wants to return stolen documents to her employer. Her dreams of bringing them to heel have vanished, and she now aspires to nothing more than to simply live. An attorney gives her a phone number and tells her to call it and leave a message. Someone might call her back, or they might not. Ash listens to her heartfelt voicemail and does indeed call her back, then utilizes a public talk-to-text system designed to help deaf people make phone calls; he types out a message, an operator reads it aloud, and then in turn types out the recipients’ responses. Not only does the service hide Ash’s actual voice, but the operators cannot repeat what they hear over the phone, no calls are recorded, and their are no records stored for future use. This is particularly important as Sarah’s employers have retained the services of Dawson (Sam Worthington), a security and surveillance expert who is tracking her every move.
A large portion of the film’s first half simply details the conversations between Ash and Sarah as he instructs her in how to avoid this surveillance, while also sending various packages through the mail to create multiple trails of forwarding addresses while hiding their motives. It’s fascinating stuff, a step-by-step procedural that demands patience but builds a huge amount of tension. The end game is simple: Sarah will return the documents to the corporation, they will pay a fee to Ash for brokering the deal, she gets her life back, and one hard copy will remain in a secure location to ensure compliance across all interested parties.
Of course, things can’t go too smoothly or Relay would be a very short film. Mackenzie and Piasecki do a good job of limiting Ash’s backstory, giving viewers just enough details about his life to make him an actual character and not just a details-oriented mastermind. He’s a recovering alcoholic who frequents AA meetings and seems to have only one genuine human relationship, with his sponsor Wash (Eisa Davis). Wash happens to be a cop, a detail that will come in to play during the film’s twisty finale, but first we get a gradual thawing of Ash’s stern exterior as he comes to feel close to Sarah (or at least her voice). This leads him to eventually bending, then breaking, his own rules, all in an effort to protect Sarah’s life.
There’s so much to like in Relay. Ahmed and James are both excellent in their respective roles, creating genuine chemistry even through these unlikely means. But the film eventually switches gears from taut procedural to a more standard thriller, and the climax doesn’t land with the oomph one might hope for. Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens do get a lot of mileage out of genuine New York location shooting, with unobtrusive long takes that allow the actors to really move through the frame and fully inhabit these actual spaces (no digital trickery here, thankfully). But even amongst journeyman directors, there’s a difference between John Flynn and Phillip Noyce. Relay wants to slot in as ’70s-style paranoia thriller a la The Conversation, but winds up feeling more like a ’90s paperback thriller. Still, studios aren’t making many of those these days, and Relay only seems like a marginal compromise of quality. Given the state of mainstream entertainment for grownups, we’ll take what we can get.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 2.
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