Riz Ahmed leads paranoid espionage thriller ‘Relay’

Whip-smart until it isn’t, and absorbing until it can no longer be, David Mackenzie’s Relay is an intelligent, character-first thriller steeped in realistic corporate espionage. Unfortunately, it swerves a little too roughly in its final act, practically skidding off the road. However, up until that point, it builds skillfully as a paranoid New York saga about loneliness and guilt, led by a magnetic performance from Riz Ahmed that speaks volumes during scenes of typing in silence.

Ahmed plays Ash—or, Tom, or John, or James; he goes by many names throughout Relay—a recovering alcoholic who moonlights as a vigilante of sorts. His job is to help whistleblowers evade harassment and corporate consequences, whether by assisting them in exposing information, or, in the case of terrified food megacorp turncoat Sarah Grant (Lily James), returning stolen documents to their employers, in exchange for being left alone. Putting this genie back in the bottle frequently weighs on his conscience, as evidenced by a subplot in which a former pharma employee he once helped—as seen in the movie’s clockwork prologue—keeps leaving him remorseful voicemails about not having gone public. Ash doesn’t respond or voice his own concerns about helping people kotow to corporate bullying, but Ahmed’s steely determination is broken up by bits of regret, pouring through the cracks in his toughened façade. 

His strange, analog M.O. makes him a ghost in a world of digital surveillance. In order for Sarah to win his trust before helping her, he makes her jump through hoops via various roundabout mailing missions at far-flung post offices in different cities, and only communicates with her via the Tri-State Relay Service, a neglected telecommunications relay outfit that helps deaf/hard of hearing and nonverbal folks communicate by phone. Ash calls the Relay with a burner cell phone hooked up to a small, pre-Internet typograph, clicking away at keys to tell the call center assistants how to respond to Sarah over the phone. Sarah, in turn, dictates her replies out loud—ending each sentence with “Go ahead”—so the dedicated intermediaries can type her messages back to Ash.

Relay is, in this way, a film of ethical middlemen stuck in strange positions. There’s an entire film to be made out of the lives of the perplexed relay callers who stick to their duties, and never question the info they’re being asked to share, even when danger is clearly afoot. But the focus of the film is the way Ash gets to know Sarah from afar, since he can hear her voice. But while there’s an altruism to his efforts—he desperately wants to get a team of corporate spies off Sarah’s back, led by a ruthless Sam Worthington—he also drops hints about having failed at similarly exposing information in the past, when he attends his weekly AA meetings.

He plays his real life close to the vest, so there’s no telling how much of his story is true, especially given the alternatives at which the movie hints. The part of his story that seems real is that he did, in fact, turn to alcohol as a means to cope with whatever failures troubled him, exacerbated by the need to fit in as an American Muslim after Sept. 11. This political element of Relay may not be a major part of its foreground, but it’s a vital part of its tapestry, and a key to understanding the specific paranoia that follows Ash throughout New York. His AA sponsor speaks of her time in the U.S. army, a pain he seems to recognize. Worthington’s corporate fixer, who eavesdrops on all of Sarah’s phone calls, throws the occasional marine battle cry (eg. “Oorah!”) into his dialogue. Ash himself is highly skilled when it comes to technology and the art of evasion; who’s to say he doesn’t have some background in military intelligence, further complicating his tale of trying to blend into a country that views him with animus?

Either way, Ash’s post-PATRIOT Act radicalism practically makes him a modern-day superhero, but he walks a lonely path that, by nature, keeps him at a distance from other people. This doesn’t stop him from trying to get close to Sarah in whatever way he can, whether watching her like a guardian angel, or dropping flirtatious hints about music via the Relay callers, as though the two were in a long-distance relationship. 

The flow of information is just as central to the movie as the backdrop of New York City, whose crowded sidewalks are the perfect (and perfectly ironic) venue for Ash to blend in anonymously. Few thrillers have so deftly captured the double-edged metropolitan sword of being constantly surrounded by people, and yet, completely alone. At times, Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens capture Manhattan the way Michael Mann does Los Angeles in Heat. 

However, where the movie begins slipping is in attempts to build a convincing romance, as Ash and Sarah fall deeper into a winding web of mercenary threats, forcing a closer physical proximity between them just to get out of trouble. Mackenzie is wildly adept at using long and medium shots to create a dynamic between people and the spaces around them, but connecting human beings through close ups—and through moments that feel untethered from time, whether or not its characters are face to face—is a fundamental bit of magic the movie sorely lacks. This in turn has a cascading effect when the movie tries to pull the rug out from under its audience, because its romantic foundations aren’t strongly laid.

However, for the majority of its runtime, Relay proves soulful and intriguing. It doesn’t require the showiness of cultural identity in order to be politically captivating, since its politics are built into its story in both literal and symbolic ways. It creates a reflection of a world broken by government and corporate surveillance, and it tells a story of the people broken by these forces in turn, as they grasp to be seen and heard, in a desperate bid to simply speak the truth, or to connect with other people.