‘Relay’: Toronto Review

Dir. David Mackenzie. US. 2024. 112mins

A slow-burn, high-concept paranoid thriller, Relay implicitly trusts its audience – until it doesn’t. Likewise, Ash (Riz Ahmed), a recovering alcoholic working to broker deals between desperate whistleblowers and conniving corporations, doesn’t trust any of his clients until he meets Sarah Grant (Lily James), a scientist who wants to return inciminating documents to her employers before they turn to violence. What begins as a long-distance partnership between Ash and Sarah soon kindles sparks, igniting an unlikely turn that obliterates the hard-fought tension the film has built.

Stumbles just before the finish line

For director David Mackenzie, Relay is a return to the type of economically-minded David versus Goliath storytelling that netted his western-thriller Hell Or High Water a Best Picture nomination. This attempt, however, isn’t as daring or as committed as that picture. A Special Presentation in Toronto, Relay has the stars to compete for a wider audience, but its measured pacing and alienating coldness may limit its appeal.

By nature, Relay is a distant picture. In a taut opening scene, Hoffman (Matthew Maher) meets a CEO at a cafe to deliver documents that incriminate the man’s company in malfeasance. Hoffman asks the CEO to take a picture — as proof of their meeting — and promises that if anything happens to him, a backup copy of the documents will leak. As this deal goes down, Ash lurks behind Hoffman, following him from the diner to the train station. Is Ash friend or foe?  

Ash has a system that never allows him to personally meet his clients. Until Sarah entered his world, it was foolproof. After whistleblowing on her biotech company for creating a dangerous strain of insect-resistant weed, Sarah is tired of the intimidation imposed by a team of goons led by Sam Worthington. She wants to make a deal, and needs Ash to be an intermediary to broker it.

Ash is a savvy operator. Rather than directly contacting his clients, he calls them via the Tri-State Relay System — a public service for the deaf and hard of hearing. When he types away on a hearing-assisted device, the message is read aloud by the operator to the person on the other line. It’s a smart gambit, because the call center is protected by law from search and seizure and doesn’t keep call logs, making it untraceable. 

Much of Relay, therefore, is a game of keeping a distance. From Ash’s spartan, whitewashed room to his secret office by a freight train, he gathers surveillance intel not unlike Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. He also sends Sarah burner phones, creates codewords, switches between myriad disguises and begins to needle Worthington’s team. His composure and defiance eventually cause him and Sarah to form the inklings of a romantic connection.

Mackenzie’s film works best when it believes in its audience. And it feels tantalisingly close to greatness when it allows the relationship between Ash and Sarah to simmer. The pacing is so unhurried, and the script has such deliberate mechanics that the film remains enthralling, despite an overbearing score. While Sarah remains an enigma, we learn much about Ash: his insecurities, regrets, and ethos. Ahmed is captivating in what is mostly a silent role, playing a cool customer in a film whose  spirit sometimes mirrors Michael Mann’s Thief. Mackenzie embeds the viewer in the black and grey shades of this puzzling world. And, similar to Mann’s Thief, he takes pleasure using an urban sprawl like New York City for some inventive set pieces. 

Relay falters, unfortunately, the second Mackenzie distrusts the viewer — pulling a twist that neither makes sense nor feels emotionally right. It’s as though he’s frightened of losing the audience, and resorts to the low-hanging plotting of B-level cop movies to bring them back. It’s a critical mistake. Not only does the error send Relay down the wrong path, toward an incomprehensible conclusion that defies the groundedness the film fought so hard to establish, it commits the unforgivable sin of stumbling just before the finish line.