Some years back I befriended a deaf mute named Mike. Our friendship was revelatory in that he exposed me to the various technologies within our society that assist hearing-impaired individuals, such as keyboards at ATM machines and—pertinent to David Mackenzie’s Relay (2024)—relay switchboards. Compensating for my being slow in learning how to sign, Mike could phone into a relay service, type in a comment, and have that read to me by a relay agent. I found the service not only helpful, but fascinating, and it served to further our friendship.
Watching how such a service becomes a lynchpin in the methodology of a fixer, Ash (Riz Ahmed), and how the relay service helps him protect whistleblowers from corrupt corporations promised to be a truly compelling narrative device. Relay services are legally blocked from sharing their call records and no logs are kept and so that privacy becomes one of the main tools in Ash’s toolbox. Emulating the tenor of surveillance thrillers from the 1970s such as The French Connection (1971) and The Conversation (1974), Relay succeeds in creating a slow burn that builds towards a satisfying tension, especially when Ash is hired by whistleblower Sarah Grant (Lily James) anxious to return stolen documents so she can avoid a campaign of intimidation. Ash instructs Sarah what she must do to achieve her goal. His instructions are complicated and convoluted with margins of error that ratchet up the suspense.
But the script is almost too complicated and the bulk of the movie is a giant red herring that reduces the film’s compelling first half into a regrettable and—more importantly—a somewhat unbelievable ending. It makes sense on paper, yes, but on film it left this viewer scratching my head, feeling manipulated to accept a seeming resolution that felt more like the forced ending of a one-hour television cop show.
Until that disappointing ending, however, I was mesmerized by Riz Ahmed’s restrained yet vibrant performance. It’s been said that Isabelle Huppert can register strong emotion with the mere shift of any eyebrow, and I could say the same about a shift of a glance from Ahmed, who I first admired in the 2016 HBO mini-series The Night Of, and who captured my attention without saying a word of dialogue in the first half hour of Relay, give or take a minute or two. His characterization began to falter when he becomes attracted to his client Sarah and takes risks that endanger the both of them. As necessary as his infatuation was to further the plot, it only leant to the unbelievability of the film’s final scenes.
