Ash is a man with a strange job. For one thing, it’s illegal; for another, he is curiously well-suited to its anonymity and moral grey areas. Played by Riz Ahmed with terse meticulousness in David Mackenzie’s New York-set thriller, Ash is a former addict who runs a business as a ‘fixer’, helping corporate whistleblowers and malcontents to quietly take their hush money from angry companies. He conducts this work mainly through ‘relay’ telephone service – intended for use by the deaf and hard of hearing – an old-fashioned item which leaves no record of its communications.
He runs into trouble when a client, Sarah (a tenacious Lily James), seems to be at risk of being snuffed out. She’s a passionate whistleblower flagging unethical practices at her bioengineering company. The unlikely duo, forced together by desperate circumstances, race against time and the arrogant capitalist goons on their tails. Those goons are led by Sam Worthington’s Dawson and Willa Fitzgerald’s Rosetti, both amusingly obnoxious and even occasionally disguised in silly gear at airports, offering both realistic and faintly humorous foils for our protagonists. The leads have an unusual rapport, with Ahmed – an icily quiet, methodical customer – particularly good.
Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style
Directed by Mackenzie, the man behind prison flick Starred Up and neo-western Hell or High Water, this is another genre exercise of sorts – a consciously retro, twisty bit of storytelling, with apt comparisons to a Hitchcock thriller or one of the paranoid, cynical ’70s political thrillers per The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor. Those films, too, pitted lone outliers and whistleblowers against institutions of power and authority. And Relay, like its antecedents, focuses on the visual storytelling and increasing tension of shoe-leather, procedural business: delivering and receiving important clues or paperwork, tense phone calls, and hot-footing it from one location to the next.
Relay is enjoyably tactile and old-fashioned, contriving to allow its characters to interact in an environment where things can play out with maximum mystery. The twist near the conclusion is a little obvious, but the narrative arriving there is too compelling for me to mind too much; by the time everyone’s drawn their guns, I was thoroughly invested. Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Oct 31.