Screenwriting wisdom is that you always cut the “shoe leather” – the boring bits getting a character from here to there. Personally, I think a lot can be revealed in the shoe leather business; after all, am I not my most me, my truest self, in my most mundane moments?
There is a limit, though, one this reversal-whistleblower thriller tests: Relay is top-heavy with shoe-leather, long minutes of fiddling with gadgetry and conducting hushed surveillance and finding loopholes in the U.S. Postal Service’s tracking system. What keeps it afloat is a charismatic lead in Riz Ahmed and an ingenious plot device.
Ahmed plays Ash, a go-between of sorts for whistleblowers who lose their nerve; he’s the guy you contact to return the documents you stole and get your corporate overlord off your back and promise not to take revenge, legally or otherwise. Here, the regretful-whistleblower is Sarah (James), a scientist troubled by data her company is sweeping under the rug, who changes her mind and reaches out to Ahmed’s Ash. In order to stay safe – and hold onto a copy of every whistleblower file as insurance policy – Ash stays strictly anonymous; he and his clients and the big bad corporations all communicate through a telecommunications relay service, a middleman largely used by the deaf and hearing impaired community. But the more Ash gets to know Sarah, through surveillance and their halted communication, which develops a poetry of its own, he starts to warm up to her in a way that has him breaking his usual rules.
Relay is clearly trying to summon the great paranoia thrillers of Seventies cinema like The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor. (Distributor Bleecker Street released a somewhat thirsty trailer with fake film scratches and retro voiceover and typeface to really hammer home the connection.) Thing is, those movies tackled serious stuff without being quite so self-serious; Relay is desperately in need of some of the swagger of director David Mackenzie’s 2015 heist film Hell or High Water, his breakout film in a career already eight films deep at that point. (The historical actioner Outlaw King has been his only feature film since.) Late in the film, Riz’s Ash slips into a couple of outfits to go undercover and the film toys with being more overtly fun, but never gives itself permission to cut loose. Still, the plot zagged in ways that surprised me, and Ahmed and James – he, tightly coiled; she, antsy and unpredictable – achieve an intriguing chemistry despite rarely sharing the same space. This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.
