In the game of poker, the ultimate question is whether at the end of the day one should twist or stick. The same logic applies to narrative cinema – should the screenwriter pull the rug out from under the audience’s feet and force them to question everything they’ve seen prior to that moment, or should they stay the course and follow the path they’ve been cultivating for the previous 90-or-so minutes? David Mackenzie’s Relay is a corporate espionage thriller which is faced with such a conundrum and is eventually forced to make a choice. We won’t say the way it goes, but in terms of logic, emotion and honest-to-goodness storytelling satisfaction, it’s the wrong choice.
And it’s the wrong choice because so much time in the film is spent making the right choice, from a compelling concept, strong performances and clipped, atmospheric dialogue. If you narrowed your eyes a bit, you might even think you were watching a peak Steven Soderbergh movie. Riz Ahmed plays Ash, a shady fixer who helps corporate whistleblowers to put the genie back into the bottle in terms of their public moral outbursts. Lily James’ Sarah leaves a message on Ash’s hush-hush answering service saying that she’s being harassed by her old employers for stealing a potentially damning report which could scupper a giant merger (even if it does also save millions in the developing world from a horrible, painful death).
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Morality is swept aside in favour of hard-nosed bureaucracy as Ash contacts his clients via the fictional Tri-State Relay Service, a telephone exchange in which operators read out messages supplied by text from hard-of-hearing customers. This way, Ash can keep his identity and location under wraps, as it’s a service which keeps no records of its calls or callers. The first order of business is to measure the threat, so Ash concocts a wild goose chase for Sarah which will allow him to get a sense of who is following her. Sam Worthington leads a team of surveillance heavies, doing what needs to be done (and more) in order to retrieve the stolen document and leave no loose ends.
For much of the runtime it’s a beautifully executed thing, with the clever tricks and layers of subterfuge coming across as quasi-Hitchcockian in their levels of suspense and authenticity. Yet as things tend to go in these stories, Ash turns out not to have a heart of stone, and his commitment to protect Sarah leads him to abandon protocol a few times too many. Yet the film presents a compelling game of cat and mouse within a moral void – the only inkling of reality that Ash gets is from the occasional rolling news story, or from previous clients leaving him messages and wondering whether they made the right choice by capitulating to the corporate jackboot.
Ahmed doesn’t put a foot wrong here, painting Ash as a conflicted hero with believable motivations for opting to do this job as well as plenty of skeletons just waiting to burst out of the closet. James, meanwhile, is far from the kooky damsel she first appears to be, and Worthington plays a blinder as the violent goon – he could have a fascinating second career chapter as a reliable, scowling antagonist. In the final chapter, the film shifts somewhat inevitably from subtle manipulations and manoeuvres to more out-and-out action, and where Mackenzie is great at directing scenes of shadowing and tailing, he falls totally flat when it comes to the fights and chases scenes. Still, even if it does eventually crumble to pieces, it’s a really strong thriller for the large majority of its runtime.