Relay
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. — DANIEL GORMAN
A Bright Future
“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle and easy affection; there is, after all, nothing profound about the statement or even the context in which it is uttered. For Elisa, the teenage protagonist of Lucía Garibaldi’s A Bright Future, the affection comes through, but so does its stifling, homiletic subtext. The unnamed streetscapes of Uruguay are tinted with pastel markers of dystopia more cosmetic than concrete, while its denizens flit about their lives, sometimes fixated — though even so rather absent-mindedly — on vague stories of an unseen “North,” where the road to paradise is being carefully paved by genetics and good social engineering. Elisa is one of the lucky candidates selected by the state to migrate over there to advance the goals of “sustainability,” chosen on account of her IQ and creativity. Her sister, Amanda, has already been, while Nélida, yearning to be with her daughters, works overtime to amass the money required to bid for a one-way ticket.
Garibaldi, to her credit, mines the most out of the contemporary milieu without pivoting to cheap absurdism. Under her watch, the film’s talking points come through unambiguously, requiring no overt dramatization to realize their import. Amidst scarcity and soulless joy, promises of abundance tend to come with expectations of conformity, and it’s precisely Elisa’s slated role — as a human worker whose physical and mental productivity will be expanded through regimes of control and social isolation — which detracts from the luster of things to come. Yet where the director’s first feature, The Sharks (2019), reduced brooding sexual tensions to ambiguous psychological shorthands, A Bright Future suffers from the opposite problem. Tantalizingly mysterious in parts, it refuses greater world-building while simultaneously laying bare the broad motivations and psychological profiles of those who wish to resist the cozy rhythms of acquiescence. In other words, cut out the vaguely sci-fi trappings, and what you’re left with is a pedestrian slice of life under capitalism.
Heightened by Arauco Hernandez’s tinctured cinematography and Cecilia Guerriero’s lightly retrofuturist production design, the film proves mostly agreeable as a work of coherent, self-contained narrative whose performances, especially those of Passeggi and Sofía Gala Castiglione (who plays Elisa’s magnetic, one-legged neighbor), lend credence to a slow-burning desire for escape and self-discovery. But its placidity and sterility are home to predictability, and once the terms are set, A Bright Future rarely ventures beyond the confines of its characters’ skin-deep convictions to posit the implications of its scenario. With most domestic animals extinct and reduced to sounds on soothing recordings, and with the common ant having inexplicably precipitated a global ecological crisis of some sort, society has turned to a benign process of eugenics inflected by visions of youth and intellectual aptitude. The details of this paradigmatic shift are not spared, however, which could either be an artistic oversight on Garibaldi’s part or her way of saying that our own prospects, despite being infinitely more risible than anything satire can muster up these days, are just as dim. — MORRIS YANG
Gonzo Girl
The author Hunter S. Thompson is widely credited with founding the “Gonzo journalism” movement, which is informally defined as incorporating subjective language and satire into immersive journalism. However, Thompson’s legend was equally burnished by his well-documented drug use, affinity for guns, and disdain for authority figures. It enshrined the writer as both provocateur and rockstar, but the profession is still beholden to boring obligations like tapping out coherent pages and meeting deadlines. Being a hugely celebrated, walking bacchanal doesn’t absolve someone from having editors breathing down their neck. That means surrounding oneself with grown-ups who are responsible for such niceties as paying the bills, cleaning up the house, procuring large amounts of narcotics, and, of course, making sure the writing is being done on time is a necessity. Frankly, it all sounds like a colossal pain in the ass, particularly if your employer is an abusive coke fiend and letch in the throes of paranoid delusions.
Gonzo Girl, the directorial debut from actress Patricia Arquette, spins a salacious if pretty dubious account of what being a de facto wet nurse to Thompson must have been like. Insulating itself from claims of fabulism, the film is based on the author Cheryl Della Pietra’s roman à clef inspired by the five months she spent as Thompson’s personal assistant in the early ’90s. And, as the film makes strenuously clear, it’s not technically about Thompson. Instead, it’s about the fictional author Walker Reade — portrayed here by William Dafoe, with a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth and donning both aviator glasses and a bucket hat — and any similarities to the man who inspired Raoul Duke are, if not coincidental, then certainly unactionable (Thompson, of course, has been dead for 20 years). Yet even with a throat-clearing onscreen disclaimer asserting that the film is “essentially” true, the whole thing comes across as opportunistic and self-aggrandizing with Gonzo Girl arguing that Della Pietra’s fictional surrogate not only matched the hard-partying Thompson (sorry, Reade) shot for shot and line of blow for line of blow, but was secretly ghostwriting his new book; surreptitiously rewriting Reade’s flawed prose and faxing it off to to the acclaim of the author’s editor. It’s a fantastical account of a young writer discovering her voice, bedding a dreamy movie star, standing up for herself against a bully, and experiencing the consciousness-upending effects of psychotropics all while intuiting what really matters. In truth, it plays at times like a dramatized essay of what the author did over their summer vacation.
Della Pietra’s Gonzo Girl stand-in goes by the name of Alley Russo (Camila Morrone), introduced here as a self-serious, slightly dowdy young woman struggling to find her place in the world after college. An aspiring author working as a bartender in New York City, Alley attends a book reading celebrating Reade where she draws attention to herself for publicly criticizing him for giving a “cop out answer” to a softball audience question. After briefly trading barbs with Reade, a mortified Alley is buttonholed by the writer’s longtime live-in assistant, Claudia (a blowsy Arquette, pulling double duty), who offers Alley a job on the spot. Arguing she knows what Walker needs (“I’m not looking for Joan Didion, I just need a hard worker with thick skin”), Claudia writes her number down on a $100 bill and asks Alley to be on a plane to Colorado in 24 hours for the opportunity of a lifetime, in the sort of dramatic contrivance which is the film’s stock-in-trade. Sure enough, Alley flies across the county on a few hours notice and finds herself at Reade’s secluded ranch where the author is already three sheets to the wind, prowling the premises with a rifle, and chasing after much younger women. As Alley gets settled in at the house, she’s given the lay of the land by Claudia: Alley is to keep tabs on Walker from 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM and to ensure he writes at least a couple pages a night to placate his exasperated editor. Also, she’s told she should probably “stop saying no” in the sort of “it was a different time” advice we’re meant to recognize signals the assignment will be a perpetual HR nightmare.
In less than a day, Alley is being hit on by an ever-grinning film actor hanging around the house (Ray Nicholson, playing a composite character at least partially inspired by his real-life father, Jack), firing handguns at cardboard cut-outs of Reagan, trading in her conservative sweater vests for form-fitting dresses and dropping acid with her boss as a carrot to get him to sit down in front of his typewriter and do his goddamn job. But while Alley gets a front row seat to the narcotized, sexually-charged madness — in a scene which qualifies in the parlance of the film as “two birds and we’re all stoned,” Alley and Walker do mushrooms with a two-time Oscar-winner and friend of Hunter’s in an unbilled cameo and proceed to sensually pour paint over one another–the writing itself remains inconsistent and of generally inferior quality. Alley can sense “old-school Walker” struggling to come through, but he just can’t seem to recapture his authentic voice after all these years “expanding his mind” and needs some help — like from a plucky young writer who will dutifully flesh out his pages after he collapses every night, expounding his spotty and uninspired accounts of the criminal underbelly into something that will instantly grab readers. Alley starts passing off her pages as the genuine article, with neither Walker nor his editor ever the wiser.
The most charitable reading of Gonzo Girl is that it’s honoring the spirit of Thompson by exaggerating a firsthand account of a problematic artist in decline, and if some of the particulars have been fudged in the telling — to name but one example, a scene where Alley is thrown into lockup after being arrested for driving under the influence while returning from a drug deal has been entirely fabricated according to Della Pietra — then so be it. Except the problem with Gonzo Girl is it fails to arrive at either a revelatory take or some greater truth about the brilliant yet complicated figure at its center. Instead, it’s content to trade in tawdry, unverifiable details, like Walker trying to seduce Alley by rubbing garlic on her nipples (don’t ask; it supposedly has something to do with the actress Anna Magnani) and a narrative that conveniently elevates the brilliance of a 20-something post-grad at the expense of someone who’s no longer around to call “bullshit” on any of this. Della Pietra’s proximity to Thompson (and with it, an assumed authority on the subject) is the only reason Gonzo Girl even exists, and the film’s a little too pleased with its trail of tabloid breadcrumbs that hint at a world of privilege and drug-fueled mania without ever quite being compelling in and of itself. For all the cocaine, American flag bikinis, and firearms, the film is still fundamentally about watching people write in solitude, a singularly uncinematic act.
Instead, Arquette’s film, which first premiered nearly two years ago at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, oscillates between doing a low-rent take on Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — when Alley tries LSD for the first time, we get plenty of “way out” melting backgrounds and food crawling off of plates – and one of those biopic-adjacent films where a regular person learns an important life lesson due to their brief cohabitation with a celebrity (e.g. My Week with Marilyn, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, etc.). In a showy if superficial role, Dafoe plays Walker as equal parts libertine and tyrant; splitting his time cooing for Alley to get into the hot tub with him and going on spiteful tirades that accuse her of being a spy. But there’s none of the curiosity or laser precision often associated with Thompson, and the sudden turn to a supportive mentor figure in the closing moments feels imposed upon the film solely to give it a sunny resolution. More damning though is Morrone as Alley, who with her slouching posture and flat infection doesn’t exactly radiate the inquisitiveness and preternatural intelligence of the sort required to improve upon a literary giant (mostly she’s just good at recognizing Fitzgerald quotes). Rather, the actress seems more comfortable sliding into the compulsory role of coquettish sexpot which perhaps explains why Arquette keeps filming her in the shower. Stray details do draw blood — the film is implicitly critical of Claudia, who comes across not only as an enabler but as someone well-practiced in sweeping up after Reade’s mistreatment of women — or have the ring of deranged truth, such as Walker showing up to the musician Rick Springfield’s house solely for the purposes of setting off firewalkers out front and mocking him. But in total, Gonzo Girl ultimately boasts all the thematic heft and staying power of an Us Weekly article. — ANDREW DIGNAN
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