“It’s a reasonably smart thriller that dumbs itself down as it goes.”
- The premise is novel
- Riz Ahmed makes a good action hero
- The script gets dopier as it goes
- The big twist is a real groaner
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There’s no shortage of movies about the courage of whistleblowers, and nor should there be: Proverbial insiders risking their professional future (and sometimes much more) to reveal the dark deeds of their industry are the real heroes of our corporate-controlled world. But what about those who want to expose the truth but get cold feet? What about the corporate cogs who try to stand up and speak out, only to realize how hopelessly outgunned and out-lawyered they are, how royally screwed they’ll be if they try to do the right thing? Maybe their stories deserve telling, too. After all, it’s a dangerous world for the righteously loose-lipped, as the ongoing saga of Boeing has made disturbingly clear.
Relay, which premiered this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, builds a whole suspense thriller around these unsung almost heroes — the would-be whistleblowers having second thoughts. The movie casts Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed as Tom, a middleman with a very specialized clientele: He helps regretful company defectors flirting with going to the press or authorities safely walk back their plans, facilitating the return of sensitive documents in exchange for an end to the intimidation tactics their powerful employers deploy. (He also, of course, demands his own eight-digit fee from the company.) Does such a service really exist? Probably not, but it’s easy to imagine a job market for someone like Tom, a fixer hired to restore silence without violently silencing anyone.
In order to effectively mediate such conflicts, Tom has to remain a ghost, unheard and unseen by both parties. He does so via a relay network that issues instructions through phone operators, so that neither the company nor the potential informant ever actually have contact with him. It’s a protocol that works for our level-headed, incognito hero… at least until he takes on the case of one Sarah Grant (The Iron Claw‘s Lily James, suppressing her usual girl-next-door radiance), a former biotech employee looking to unload the incriminating evidence that got her relocated, sacked, and then harassed. What’d she uncover? Namely, proof that the new insect-resistant crop her company was developing could have dire medical side effects for consumers.
For a while, Relay works as a game of cat and mouse where the mouse is just trying to restore the status quo of an insidious cover-up. The evil company has sent its own in-house fixers who seem ready to kill the scandal the literal, old-fashioned way. (They’re led by a cast-against-type Sam Worthington, who’s having a pretty good year at the movies; the Avatar star is as effectively villainous here as he was charmingly virtuous in Costner’s Horizon.) There’s a great early scene at the airport — a kind of miniature, low-tech Mission: Impossible set piece — where Tom uses PA announcements to outwit and evade the pursuers, and eventually has Sarah mail two packages (one containing the proof of misdeeds) to different far-flung locations, creating a kind of postal two-card monte.
Relay is gripping so long as it’s just observing Tom on the move. He’s like Michael Clayton by way of Jason Bourne, using his chiefly analog systems — telephones, the mail, goofy disguises — to flummox more technologically advanced adversaries and keep his client out of the crosshairs. The film is directed by David Mackenzie, the Scottish genre dabbler best known for his best movie, another feature-length series of chases and evasions, Hell or High Water. His camera, like his characters, is always pursuing; the film begins with a tense long take that follows the great character actor Matthew Maher from the street into a diner, where he completes the final handoff of an earlier operation Tom oversees. The gleaming digital cinematography sometimes destroys the illusion that we’re watching a paranoid ’70s thriller (or even a ’90s update of the same). But the action is clean and legible, which is important for a movie that’s all about the movement of bodies, papers, and information.
The drama is hokier. Ahmed creates quiet flickers of conscience with a relative sparsity of dialogue — he’s well-cast as a rigorously professional instrument of action concealing a soul beneath his code — so it’s a pity Justin Piasecki’s script feels the need to “humanize” him further by making him a recovering alcoholic nursing old wounds. (The AA subplot ends up serving a dual function, facilitating a deus ex machina.) And while it’s a cute idea to have Tom and Sarah develop a faintly romantic connection through the relay system (they swap messages that grow gradually more personal and playful), the relationship is rather literally phoned in. The film would benefit from the spikier, more flavorful dialogue Taylor Sheridan brought to Hell or High Water.
The less businesslike and procedurally oriented Relay becomes, the less it connects. It’s a reasonably smart thriller that dumbs itself down as it goes, replacing Hitchcockian chess moves with generic gunplay in the final stretch. Worse, the plot takes a late left turn that doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s one of those “mind-blowing” twists that ends up feeling like a cheat on the audience, because it depends on characters behaving in certain ways only for our benefit. There’s some nifty novelty to Relay’s premise — to its interest in the wavering conviction of whistleblowers, to the unusual job it imagines around that subject, and to a modern movie dabbling in conspiracy-theory thrills long out of vogue. Once the film moves on from those elements, it flatlines like a phone left hanging off the hook.
Relay recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is awaiting U.S. distribution.
