Plenty of movies about whistleblowers have a scene (or several) where the hero is given the chance to accept a payout and walk away. What these movies rarely include is a scene where the whistleblower acquiesces and agrees to give up – or one where they decide, at more or less the last minute, that they’ve changed their mind and want the corporate hush money back on the table. This anticlimax in waiting is the unusual jumping-off point for Relay, a paranoid thriller that sneaks in its character study so stealthily that it takes a while to realize who is actually being studied.
The would-be whistleblower in question is Sarah (Lily James). She approaches a traditional law firm and explains her situation: At work, she raised questions about the harmful nature of a bioengineered food product, was punished and eventually fired for raising the issue, but kept a copy of the damning documents, thinking she would go public with this information. After some intense (if mostly off-screen) harassment, she’s ready to simply give the material back, but fears it may be too late for whatever corporate thugs have been hired to intimidate her. The law firm can’t help, but they give her contact information for someone who can: Ash (Riz Ahmed), a lone fixer, operating anonymously. He specializes in negotiating exactly this kind of takeback, exchanging sensitive documents for a hefty payout and keeping secured copies on hand to assure his client’s safety. We see a possible end result up front, as the movie opens with another whistleblower (Matthew Maher) holding a terse exchange with a CEO, arranged (and watched from a distance) by Ash.
Ash’s clients aren’t ever supposed to meet him, or even hear him. He moves through the shadows, communicating with them through a relay phone service, typically used to facilitate calls for people with disabilities. (Despite the service’s utility for the hearing impaired, Ahmed is not reprising his Sound of Metal character, further afflicted by hearing loss, at least so far as we can tell.) As such, Ahmed barely says a word for the first half of Relay, and even as director David Mackenzie moves to focus more on his life, Ahmed’s eyes typically convey more than his dialogue, about how Ash has willed himself into ghostliness as a defense mechanism against his own demons.
Sarah is more apt to actually speak, conversing with Ash by proxy through the relay service and requiring a lot of assurance that he can help her out of this jam. The procedures Ash follows in order to receive payments, exchange documents, and contact a group of menacing corporate operators (their leader is played by a perfectly glowering Sam Worthington) are entertainingly labyrinthine, involving plane tickets (used and unused), post office boxes, and Ash overseeing the situation in a variety of low-key disguises. By this point, the movie should be laugh-out-loud ridiculous; Mackenzie, who brought such urgency to Hell or High Water, ensures that it can be taken as seriously as necessary while still providing the requisite thrills, or even mischievous smiles. A scene where Worthington’s crew realizes that Ash is spying on them subtly cops to this when it pays brief, unexpected homage to Heat.
Like that Michael Mann classic, Relay keeps its leads physically separate for much of its runtime, even as their lives become increasingly entwined – and slip-ups threaten to draw them closer together still. The relationship, such as it is, should be far too remote to develop, yet there’s also an old-fashioned simplicity to their old-tech communication: burner phones, text-to-human-speech relays, talking instead of messaging. It mirrors the old-fashioned craft of the movie itself, and makes for a neat contrast to the nomadic gig-economy nature of Ash’s peculiar but lucrative job. James and Ahmed really do feel like they could be sharing some smoldering romantic drama in another movie, so as absurd as it is to project romantic feelings onto their characters, it also makes intuitive sense – a star-crossed vibe that the movie cannily exploits.
Though James has that movie-star look, Relay truly belongs to Ahmed, doing a street-level variation on ’90s knockoffs of paranoid ’70s thrillers that also brings to mind the mid-century period when noir-adjacent thrillers started to shoot on location more frequently. (Compared to so many Canadian New Yorks, this movie practically constitutes a weeklong vacation in the actual city; no wonder it’s playing at the Tribeca Festival this spring.) If that makes Mackenzie’s film a little too copy-of-a-copy to really connect to the current moment, the way Hell or High Water did, it doesn’t reduce the movie’s effectiveness as a taut thriller with a memorable lead character hiding in plain sight.
Relay will play again at the Tribeca Festival on June 8, 11, and 13.
Director: David Mackenzie
Screenwriter: Justin Piasecki
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Matthew Maher
Release Date: June 7, 2025 (Tribeca); August 22, 2025 (theaters)
