Relay

by Mike McGranaghan

It took every ounce of restraint I could muster up to avoid throwing something at the screen during the final twenty minutes of Relay.

For an hour-and-a-half, this is a brilliant thriller, full of twists and turns that don’t insult your intelligence. Sarah Grant (Lily James) smuggled some documents out of the biotech company where she worked, indicating they’re covering up the undesirable results of a food safety report. The company has begun harassing her, so she decides not to blow the whistle after all. For help, she turns to Ash (Riz Ahmed), an unseen fixer who communicates through a talk-to-text relay service. He agrees to broker a deal in which Sarah will return the documents and the company will call off its investigators, led by the very headstrong Dawson (Sam Worthington).

Tension is built several ways in Relay. Sarah can only communicate with Ash via an intermediary, thereby lending an edge of uncertainty to things. She’s putting blind trust in someone whose identity she doesn’t even know. The various ways Dawson and crew try to intimidate her create the kind of paranoid feel that permeated many of the best 1970s thrillers, like The Parallax View. Snags also present themselves, leaving Ash in a position where he needs to improvise split-second strategies that won’t blow his cover or endanger Sarah any further. Director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) maximizes the suspense with a taut pace.

A nice human component flows underneath. Sarah begins to feel a sense of security working with Ash, despite his mysterious nature. He’s potentially her only hope of getting through the situation unscathed. On the flip side, Ash becomes more personally invested in Sarah’s case than normal. She’s a real person to connect with, however surreptitiously. For a lonely recovering alcoholic, the woman on the other end of the line proves to be a source of comfort.

Both lead actors do first-rate work. James conveys the fear and trepidation inside Sarah, while Ahmed – who doesn’t speak for large chunks of the movie – projects quiet intensity, letting us know Ash is a guy who takes his job very seriously. Worthington is good, too, bringing the exact right kind of realistic menace to Dawson. Together, they make the characters as compelling as the story is.

Relay’s fatal flaw arrives around the 90-minute mark in the form of an absolutely horrendous plot twist. I won’t spoil it, but the twist betrays everything we’ve been watching up to this point. It’s artificial, it’s unearned, and it made me completely stop caring about the movie. The final 20 minutes devolve into a routine and preposterous chase that’s built around this development. A lot of thrillers these days think there needs to be some game-changer at the end – something to pull the rug out from under the audience. Writer Justin Piasecki should have trusted his premise rather than leaning on that contrivance.

Because Relay so effectively establishes the stakes, the whole picture is ruined by that phony twist. Yes, most of it is excellent, but the ending is a crushing disappointment that sent me away deeply unsatisfied and wondering why I even bothered.

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