'Relay' Is a Fleet-Footed Thriller Until It Fumbles the Climax

I’m not sure if we can ever fully return to the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s if only because they arrived during Hollywood’s Second Golden Age, a rare moment that allowed for the total downer ending. As much as audiences once thrilled to watching the bleakest conclusions imaginable, even this approach declined with the era with audiences seeking more uplifting tales (more Rocky, less Midnight Cowboy), and the whole “Morning in America” schtick of the 1980s. America didn’t solve any of the problems of paranoia and corruption; it just got tired of looking at them.

When films aspire to return to the bleak 1970s, they can only go so far because audiences are so unaccustomed to anything outside the horror genre leaving them on a down note. As much as Marvel wanted to claim that Captain America: The Winter Soldier evoked conspiracy thrillers, that only works if Hydra wins at the end. Otherwise you just have a stew of paranoia where eventually truth and honor wins out, a far cry from the malaise and bitterness seen in movies like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. What makes Relay so intriguing is how it seeks to use that paranoia as power, leaning into our disconnected world and finding a way to thrive in the wasteland. David Mackenzie’s movie excels at maneuvering through a surveillance state with bottomless corporate power until it drops a useless twist that undermines everything that came before.

The world of Relay is incredibly bleak where people aren’t whistleblowers; they’re in retreat. They thought about holding their companies to account for misdeeds, but confronted with corporate power and harassment, they just wish to strike a deal that will grant them freedom. This is where Ash (Riz Ahmed) comes in. He’s a broker using a relay service (a keyboard that types out his messages, typically used by the hearing impaired on phone calls, and then relayed by an operator) to keep the whistleblower and company separate. There’s nothing “noble” in this work—it’s basically blackmail and extortion—but it keeps whistleblowers safe from corporate wrath after the whistleblower learns that justice is impossible. Ash’s latest client is Sarah (Lily James), a biotech scientist seeking to escape from the harassment of her employer’s goons, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington). However, while all of Ash’s work is about keeping people apart, he starts to bond with Sarah and risks breaking his rules in order to keep her safe.

Relay captivates not because it’s necessarily trying to evoke the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, but because it’s consciously living in their fallout. The ideology here is that since the bad guys always won in those movies, the only way to survive is to outsmart their surveillance. There is no institution that can protect you, so you have to find tricks and workarounds like the relay service. We’ve lost human connection, but that’s the price of survival in this world where you can’t hope to beat a company, but maybe you can extract a price for their misdeeds and force them to grant you a reprieve. Ash is “winning” but only insofar as anyone in a wasteland can claim a victory. You get a little money, you thumbed your nose at the powerful, and everyone lives to fight another day. Stopping corruption or improving the world aren’t on the table.

This underlying melancholy helps power Relay to a distinct identity in its genre, and one that feels of a piece with Mackenzie’s earlier films Hell or High Water and Starred Up. There’s the notion that everything is awful and you can only carve out a little piece for yourself at best, and certainly not with any moral clarity. The film is compelling because we’re watching Ash wrestle with the idea, “Is this all there is? Is this the best I can hope for?” It speaks well to our age where we’re under constant surveillance by the tech industry, our institutions only protect the powerful, and it’s left us all feeling atomized and alienated from each other. Ash thinks he’s found strength in this system only to have his relationship with Sarah illustrate what he’s truly missing. You can feast on nihilism, but it’s thin gruel. You’re eventually going to want something real even if it means taking a risk.

Here’s where it all goes sideways. Major spoilers ahead.

Sarah was working with Dawson and his employer the whole time. The prologue where Ash helps a guy in a similar situation (Matthew Maher) still hasn’t sat right with the extorted employer. The real mission the whole time has been to draw Ash out into the open where they can not only recover the files he has for safekeeping, but presumably kill him so he never pesters any powerful person again.

It’s a bad twist because rather than show any character growth for Ash, it only reaffirms his belief that you can’t trust anyone. He doesn’t have to change, he was right all along, and the world is terrible. And here’s the thing: if you want to really make that bleak callback to the political thrillers of the 1970s, you can do it, but you can’t flinch. To make it come close to working, you need Sarah to kill Ash, completing the betrayal and its cost. It may not feel good (or even be the most satisfying narrative payoff), but at least it’s honest.

Instead, we get the worst outcome where Sarah reveals her true nature only to lead to a silly chase scene capped off with the arrival of the cops, led by Ash’s buddy from AA, Wash (Eisa Davis). Keep in mind that what little we know of Wash is that she feels like she was driven to drinking by the deep-rooted corruption in the force. We also know from what we’ve seen in this world that you don’t go to the cops because the cops won’t protect whistleblowers. But now when Ash’s back is up against the wall, it’s cops to the rescue? It doesn’t fit with any of the bleakness we’ve seen before, and serves as a weird refutation of Sarah’s betrayal. Ash did have a true friend, but it was Wash, a minor supporting character who has a useful job.

I understand not wanting to make Sarah a damsel in distress, and it may seem like her betrayal empowers her. But it misses her importance to the larger narrative and how this is ultimately Ash’s story. Either he learns to reenter the world or that the world can’t be reentered. Instead, Relay tries to conclude its story on a mushy middle ground where the bad guys get thwarted, Ash is willing to leave his life as a broker behind, and the good folks at the Tri-State Relay Service (who had no idea they were part of these machinations) get a box of cash in the mail. It’s about as flat an ending as you could get after all the quick and clever maneuvering that came before.

As difficult as the 70s conspiracy thrillers could be, at least they committed to the gut punch. They said wholeheartedly, “You can’t win,” and then left you to muse about the state of the world. Relay starts from a similar place, but lacks the courage of its convictions. Maybe it’s just a product of our current filmmaking landscape where no one wants to make anything too bleak (unless it’s on television or in a horror film), and that Relay wants to have it both ways by hitting us with Sarah’s true identity but not punishing Ash for choosing to believe he could connect with another person. But these two plot points can’t coexist, and the story’s inability to commit to a clear vision means that all of its thematic weight was in service to nothing more than Ash’s neat tricks. The bleakest element of Relay becomes how it doesn’t want to interrogate the ideas behind a paranoid thriller; it just wants to use their aesthetics for toothless entertainment.