Did you ever wonder how it’s possible to have secure communication in an age of near-total surveillance? “Relay” lays out a possible scenario, using details of a real-world service that “enable(s) people who are Deaf, Hard of Hearing, DeafBlind or those with a Speech Disability to place and receive phone calls.” In this movie, a same-named company uses the technology to oversee contact between those who don’t want their ugly secrets getting out, and whistleblowers who could expose them but would rather be paid off and sign a non-disclosure agreement. The process isn’t 100% secure. Nothing is. “Relay” is about a case where things don’t go as planned.
Riz Ahmed stars as Ash, a New York loner who works for Relay out of his small apartment and seems to have no friends or family. Lily James plays Sarah Grant, who works for a bioengineering company. Sarah’s employers have created a genetically manipulated grain that they advertise as a solution for farmers in impoverished countries. But it has toxic side effects. The company has decided to sell the grain anyway, and they’re about to get bought by another company for billions of dollars. The Securities and Exchange Commission filing is just days away.
Sarah’s predicament is laid out in an early scene when she seeks representation from a lawyer. She says she learned of the side effects of the grain and brought it the attention of higher-ups, but was ostracized, transferred, and finally harassed and stalked. She tells the lawyer she wants to sue the company for what they did to her. The lawyer tells Sarah, “I commend you for your intentions here, but we’re no longer interested in this kind of business,” then puts her in touch with Relay, which assigns Ash to handle her case.
What follows is an elaborate cat-and-mouse scenario. Ash handles the on-the-ground transfer of Sarah’s package of incriminating documents. Sarah, who has abandoned her old apartment and temporarily moved into new digs, communicates with Ash through Relay’s service. Meanwhile, a squad of goons paid by the corporation to get the materials back (without, presumably, having to pay anybody anything) spies on Sarah and tries to figure out who the courier is. Throughout the process, the desk jockeys in cubicles at Relay’s New York office act as air traffic controllers, negotiating the movements of all parties and giving them very specific instructions that they must obey if the operation is to be successful for all involved. Large amounts of cash come into play at the beginning and end of the process. Relay gets an upfront fee for handling the secure communications (including Ash’s services), paid by both Sarah and the company. The company is then expected to pay a much larger amount to Sarah once all of the details are wrapped up. She’ll sign an NDA, and the company must agree to abide by all the terms they agreed to, lest a “security” copy of the incriminating information be leaked to law enforcement and the media.
This is one of those cases where the plot of a film is clever enough that the reviewer would feel bad for including too many details, especially from to the second half, which takes all of the major players, who have mostly been moving the story forward by making cell phone calls via Relay and mailing overnight packages, and dumps them onto the street, where they run and drive around. Both sections of the story are well-done, but even though the first half has a few problems that become clear in retrospect, it’s more engaging than the second half because we’ve seen a lot of stories about smart but troubled young modern knights trying to help a beautiful damsel in distress evade predators in the city, but not one where the most important action is virtual.
Writer Justin Piasecki and director David MacKenzie (“Hell or High Water”) have clearly studied the classics of the so-called paranoid thriller genre. Aficionados will see a lot of echoes here: everything from “Three Days of the Condor” and “Klute” to more desk bound tales like the short-lived but excellent AMC series “Rubicon” and the USA Network’s “Mr. Robot”. The latter is probably the work that “Relay” resembles the most, with a quietly charismatic, hoodie-wearing New Yorker of color doing cool things on a computer, then venturing into the wider world for old-fashioned spycraft (hidden cameras, tracking devices, disguises). A lot of modern questions that viewers might have pondered while reading the news, like “how can a person remain anonymous in a world where everybody seems to know everything about everyone,” are answered here.
The technical aspects of the movie are superb, especially the wide-format cinematography (by veteran British lensman Giles Nuttgens) and the sound design, which makes scenes with multiple speakers in different locations overlap each other in a realistic way, but without turning the dialogue track into mush. The movie’s relaxed confidence and eye for unusual details are commendable and could only have come from a creative team that put a lot of work into research and tried to integrate it into the plot in a dynamic way rather than dump it all out in expository monologues (although there are a few of those, mainly in the first section).
However, when you look back on the entire story, you might be as irritated as I was by choices that break narrative momentum and believability, such as the coincidence of Ash just happening to have connections with the only person who can play deus ex machina when things are at worst; and the scenes of Ash in recovery for alcoholism, which seem in retrospect like they’re mainly about giving the star a straightforward way to humanize his character and justifying a subsequent plot development.
Sometimes a movie presents us with a character who is an enigma and keeps him an enigma (think of Clint Eastwood’s early roles), and other times it sets them up a question mark but then turns them into a full human being. The characterization of Ash gets stranded between those poles. The movie might have been better off telling us less about him, because Ahmed is so watchable that he can get away with barely speaking during the film’s first half; and because each new detail we learn makes him less compelling. When you finally hear his explanation for why he does what he does, there’s no impact, because it’s what just about anyone would imagine as his backstory.
Still, Ahmed once again proves himself a mesmerizing leading man. Most of “Relay” is carried by the actor’s introverted energy, which is contained and focused but seems capable of morphing into impulsivity, obsession, and purposeful violence. The supporting performances are strong as well, including a cameo by the great Victor Garber, a strong antagonist turn by Sam Worthington as the leader of the team tailing Sarah, and a supporting turn by Matthew Maher as a previous client of Relay’s who got what he wanted but has not been healed by his victory. This is a good movie. But it seems to be at odds with itself. And if you think back over how the story was set up and how it built towards its final section, you may conclude that it doesn’t quite play fair.
There’s another problem as well, one that all new thrillers are going to have to contend with: the past decade of American political life has proved that the old movie thriller wrap-up scenes—i.e., delivering the truth to police or the media, or publicly telling the truth at a stockholder’s meeting or press conference where the guilty parties are present—don’t work anymore because audiences have become so cynical, or perhaps we should say realistic, about the likelihood of the authorities, whoever they are, of standing up for the underdog. It is now possible for a prominent person accused of wrongdoing to shrug off public condemnations and either continue to insist they did nothing wrong or wait until the outrage dies down and resume their treachery. Under an authoritarian government—which is what the US now has—there’s an additional complication: corruption has been mainstreamed and normalized.
Worthington’s character has a brief moment where he makes a few of these observations to Ash, to demoralize him. The script is putting wisdom into the mouth of a devil, but that doesn’t mean it’s not wisdom, and the movie seems reluctant to follow it to its logical, awful conclusion.
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