Relay, 2025.
Directed by David Mackenzie.
Starring Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Pun Bandhu, Eisa Davis, Matthew Maher, Seth Barrish, Victor Garber, Reed Northrup, Aaron Roman Weiner, and Jessica Garza.
SYNOPSIS:
A broker of lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten them breaks his own rules when a new client seeks his protection to stay alive.
Relay is kind of like the Joe Rogan or Elon Musk of movies. Initially, it comes across as intelligent, but the longer it runs, the more it becomes clear this is actually astoundingly dumb. To clarify, Hell or High Water director David Mackenzie (and screenwriter Justin Piasecki) hasn’t crafted a right-wing paranoia thriller, but a movie that eventually descends into such nonsensical stupidity that any goodwill curried beforehand dissipates. It’s a twisty thriller that would be infinitely better without its big twist, which instead stuck to exploring themes of loneliness, isolation, recovery from addiction, paranoid personalities, and even unlikely romance.
This review must be opened that way because, even when there are nice things to say about the film, they need to come with that caveat: things will get utterly idiotic for no reason and render the reaction to the story, characters, and themes up until then moot. There is no good reason for what Relay does, which, until that point, is a smart and appropriately emotionally distant cat-and-mouse thriller.
Riz Ahmed plays an anonymous world-class fixer who works from the shadows (and will simply be known as Riz here on out, as there is no name but to the face until the third act), but rather than killing clients, his skills involve mediating high-stakes truces between potential whistleblowers and corrupt corporations. His latest client is scientific researcher Sarah (Lily James), horrified that a pesticide repellent for wheat she had been studying the development of has turned out to be quite lethal with its side effects (diverticulitis, cancer, and more), and that the company has eliminated any traces of those reports in efforts for FDA approval. Essentially, they are going to sell the product without any moral quandaries regarding those who will fall fatally ill. Sarah isn’t out to do any whistleblowing, though, but instead return the documents without consequences, as the harassment and threats have become too much for her to bear.
As covering tracks in the modern age (especially a digital footprint) is nearly impossible, Riz makes use of a middleman service temporarily for the deaf when communicating with his clients: they speak a message, a handler then relays the message to him through a typewriter-like gadget, which he then types a response through to be repeated to the client. When the call is finished, the center is bound by secrecy to not say a word and carries no records of the conversations. Apparently, this is true even when the well-being of millions is at stake, but as has been mentioned several times, this is a film that confidently believes it is smart only to trip over itself multiple times.
To be fair, Riz IS a savvy mastermind when it comes to Sarah’s safety, whether it be burner phones or USPS loopholes to not only mail her copies of the real product report, but also how to play misdirection with the tracking information from a group of company henchmen (led by Sam Worthington) on her tail and instructed to retrieve the documents by any means necessary. There are numerous scenes that combine stealth, oddball instructions, evasion, and all-around intriguing secrecy. One scene at an opera house even comes with a physical altercation as resolving the situation grows dicier by the day.
And part of why that becomes complicated is that Riz, a recovering alcoholic who got into this sketchy and risky line of work due to his OCD like attention to detail and willingness to help others, is also a loner and catching feelings for Sarah. It’s a bit creepy, considering he is an unknown stalking her for her protection, but there is also a sense that she might have no one else either. As such, Riz begins taking greater risks – ones involving his blowing his cover to her and those that want to catch both of them – in the name of something that starts closing the gap of the cold, emotionally distant nature of the storytelling. With inside jokes about The Beatles and brief conversations that go slightly beyond keeping Sarah safe, there is also a possibility that she is attracted to the man keeping her alive.
Directed with tension and boasting a unique communicative angle, Relay his this and those engaging themes going for it. All it has to do is stick the landing to even a moderately satisfactory degree. Instead, everything goes up in smoke, leaving the only thing to relay is that it falls apart.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
