I love what David Mackenzie did when he made Hell or High Water. I like Riz Ahmed and Lily James. Oh, and Sam Worthington is playing a villain this time instead of trying to sell himself as a leading man? Yeah, I’m 100 percent down with what’s on offer with Relay. What have we got?
The title refers to a relay service that’s difficult to explain with mere text. Imagine a phone call between an able-bodied person and someone who’s mute or hard of hearing. One of them is actively talking and listening while the deaf/mute party is typing on a specialized device and watching a text readout. Between the two is the relay service, someone sitting in an office who’s translating between text and speech. It’s an archaic means of telecommunication for the mute and hard of hearing, from a time before text messaging was a thing, but it works and it’s apparently still around.
But here’s the kicker: Due to accessibility laws that have been on the books since the ’90s, relayed phone calls are so intensely confidential that there are no written records of any kind about any of the calls. Even if someone came down with a subpoena or a search warrant, there would be nothing to find. And because this is all happening at a phone bank, it’s a different person translating each phone call. Put simply, what we’ve got here is a means of electronic communication that’s nigh impossible to trace.
Enter Sarah Grant (Lily James), formerly an employee of an agricultural company that’s into some shady shit that could potentially put millions of lives in danger, and she can prove it. She’s been bullied and harassed incessantly even after getting forced out of the company, so now she wants to return the evidence and make everything go away. Except there’s no way to guarantee that she can make the drop safely and there’s nothing to stop the evil corporate overlords from making her disappear after her leverage is all gone.
The bad news is, even the high-powered law firms of New York City are afraid to help with such a case. The good news is, there’s an off-the-books mediator who deals in exactly this sort of problem. Thus Sarah calls the Tri-State Relay Service and some shadowy figure picks up the other end.
This shadowy figure (we’ll call him “Ash”, played by Riz Ahmed) has put significant time and money and resources into staying hidden and anonymous. This guy is acutely aware that he’s dealing with the best mercenaries that money can buy, and he’s got all sorts of tricks to throw anyone off the scent. Even better, he’s not using any kind of cutting-edge sci-fi technobabble, or anything more advanced than burner phones. Ash primarily uses the US Postal Service, the Tri-State Relay Service, public libraries, the New York subway, and other such arcane government services that everyone else either forgot about or takes for granted. But Ash has an encyclopedic knowledge of the obscure laws and loopholes within such services, and he knows how to use the bureaucracy to his advantage in clever ways.
Basically put, this film positions itself as an antidote to all the paranoia about tech surveillance and corporate hegemony. If you want to fight the powers that be and do it in a safe and anonymous way, the film clearly shows that it can be done. Even against all the pressure to modernize, there are still pockets of the world where untraceable analog tech is available and useful.
Between Ash and his corporate-hired opponents (played by Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, and Pun Bandhu), we’re watching a conflict between two sides who are both absurdly overpowered, with the tech and experience to handle any given scenario. And yet the conflict remains engaging to watch precisely because both sides are so evenly matched. Each attempt at outplaying one another will either be the time someone gets lucky or it’ll be another fiendishly clever parry, and it’s gonna be fun either way.
More importantly, our protagonist comes with a highly vulnerable handicap: His client.
Not to say that Sarah is an idiot — far from it — but she’s out of her depth. This is a highly sensitive and intensely stressful scenario that she’s simply not cut out for. Which means that sooner or later, she’s going to make a mistake. It’s anyone’s guess as to when or how that happens, who might get hurt as a direct result, and whether Ash will be capable of safely cleaning up the mess.
Moreover, Sarah is young, pretty, and single, with no apparent family connections, and now she’s isolated in a hotel room for her own protection while all this is going on. And the only one she can talk with, the only one she can trust with her life, is some nameless and faceless figure on the other end of a relay service.
As for Ash, we can see for ourselves that he’s perpetually alone as part of his work, and it’s starting to wear him down. I might add that he’s a recovering alcoholic who shows up to group meetings, but he doesn’t get much out of them because he’s got nothing to share with the group. So of course he starts to develop a connection with Sarah in spite of himself, with pros and cons that all have to come out in the wash sooner or later.
It certainly doesn’t help Ash’s mental/emotional state that he’s got serious ethical questions about the nature of what he does. Yes, he’s helping whistleblowers who are in no position to help themselves. But he’s also helping to cover up evidence of corporate wrongdoing that could put millions of lives at risk. There is blood on his hands, and on those of his clients. Then again, given the general apathy of the public, the corrupt nature of government officials, and the frenetic pace of the modern news cycle, who’s to say if incriminating documents made public would do any good at any rate?
That said, those same documents and the threat of making them public are the cornerstone of what Ash does. If he and his corporate adversaries genuinely believed that exposure wouldn’t do any good, Ash would have no leverage and he’d be no help to anyone. Hell, why would Ash’s clients be in any danger to begin with?
Ahmed does a fantastic job playing the stoic badass, and it’s deeply satisfying to watch the character slowly start to thaw as the plot unfolds. Worthington is indeed much better suited to playing the heavy. Lily James is charming and winsome as ever, and she does a fine job playing a woman coming unglued by long-term isolation under the stress of fatal peril. I’d be remiss not to mention Willa Fitzgerald — between this and Strange Darling, she’s growing into quite the femme fatale.
Justin Piasecki turned in quite a remarkable script, with all sorts of reversals and curveballs. We get some nicely clever setups/payoffs in here, and the pacing feels just right. Granted, there is one particular climactic plot twist that’s likely to be controversial among viewers. It’s frankly a miracle that plot twist didn’t break the whole damn movie, though some filmgoers might argue that it does. Reasonable minds can disagree. Personally, I don’t think it takes anything away from the themes and character development where Ash is concerned.
Overall, I had a great time with Relay. It’s a tight and intelligent cat-and-mouse thriller, culminating in some neat chase scenes and shootouts in the third act. The cast is stellar across the board, the schemes are convoluted yet easy to follow, and the suspense is engaging from start to finish. Best of all, it’s a film that made me feel smarter for watching it, and that’s just about the highest compliment I can pay to a film in this lane.
You won’t lose anything if you wait for home video, but I’d definitely recommend checking it out ASAP.