Relay Review
Relay (2024) Film Review from the 24th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by David Mackenzie, written by Justin Piasecki, and starring Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Willa Fitzgerald, Sam Worthington, Matthew Maher, Eisa Davis, Helen Eigenberg, Aaron Roman Weiner, and Reed Northrup.
David Mackenzie’s new film, Relay, is a tightly curated espionage flick that trades steamy romance and Bond villain monologues for seamless direction and slow-burning tension that crescendos in the film’s twisty third act. It calls to mind other landmark pictures in this subgenre, like Coppola’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture, The Conversation, and Tony Scott’s underrated Enemy of the State (rest in peace, Gene Hackman), but Mackenzie focuses his lens around the high-stakes world of whistleblowing and the lengths that people and corporations will go to suppress the truth and the people brave enough to expose it.
Originally hailing from England, Mackenzie made a mark with a particularly American film, the 2016 Taylor Sheridan-penned script Hell or High Water. A movie that would go on to earn a Best Picture nomination the following year. While the exteriors of Hell or High Water and Relay may differ drastically, at their core, they share many similarities. Complicated lead characters who try and do the right thing against hulking corporate monsters. In Hell or High Water, it’s the American banking system, and in Relay, it’s biotech companies that suppress data that can hurt innocent people. Both are exceedingly classy ways to ultimately tell a punk rock ‘stick it to the man’ storyline.
For Relay, Mackenzie leans heavily on our lead character, played by Riz Ahmed (he goes by several names in the film; we’ll use James), to do much of the heavy lifting, and it’s masterfully handled. In the film, he works as a middleman between whistleblowers and the corporations being extorted to ensure safe transfer of all documents and money. Things take an interesting turn when a wunderkind scientist turned accidental whistleblower, Sarah (Lily James), rings up James in need of his services, and this is where the hook for the film and name come from.
In order to protect himself and the clients he takes on, James uses the New York Relay Service, a free public service that enables people with hearing loss or speech loss to use a telecommunication device. The dialogue is so minimalistic, at first, we are almost led to believe that James suffers from one of these two things but come to learn that it’s used as a firewall to protect all cellular communication. The relay service does not keep any call logs or record their conversations, so when the corporate goons headed by Sam Worthington come knocking, they leave the building empty-handed.
Ahmed is one of the hardest-working actors today, and he turns in another dynamite performance as the reclusive and complicated James. With no more than two dozen lines, Ahmed relies on facial expressions and body language to build out the character and the world he exists in. His ability to harbor sorrow behind his big, brown eyes allows the audience to empathize with him before we know the root of his pain. But it isn’t all internal conflict; Ahmed has some fun going through about ten different costume changes over the course of the film to blend in while on the job. Even against the bright lights of New York City, Ahmed shines in his performance as James.
The film is well acted, superbly directed, and expertly written by Justin Piasecki, but if there are any gripes with the movie, they come from the final ten or fifteen minutes. Some viewers will likely find the addition of gunfights and the ending to be a more predictable swing than anticipated, but I felt the picture earned those final swerves and who doesn’t enjoy a little gunfire with their pseudo-spy thrillers?
All in all, Relay more than delivers the goods without shoving the “Big Brother is watching” mythos into the face of the viewer. It doesn’t need to. This picture plays like a game of chess, not checkers.
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