RELAY

Ash (Oscar winner Riz Ahmed) is a fixer who brokers deals between whistleblowers and corrupt corporations. He uses a message relay service to remain anonymous while facilitating these deals and never has face-to-face contact with his clients. He breaks his own rules when he is contacted by Sarah (Lily James), a biotech scientist, who discovers secrets about a product her company plans to release. She seeks Ash’s help to return incriminating documents and to ensure her safety. As Ash tries to protect Sarah from a team of corporate mercenaries (with Sam Worthington as the lead thug), he navigates a complex system of communication to evade identification. Pitched as a thriller, the film has very little action and is slow to progress. It felt like at least 90 minutes of the run time was dedicated to watching Ash take new burner phones out of their packaging and swapping out SIM cards. There’s a plot twist ten minutes before the end that I didn’t predict, though on reflection there are several red flags that give it away and a few cinema goes guessed it in advance. The closing scene is when the suspense finally arrives but it’s conveniently over all too soon. Ahmed and Lily do their best with the material, though Ahmed’s role mostly involves silent acting with little backstory aside from being a recovering alcoholic. The implied attraction their characters have for each other has little basis given their limited interactions and it seems a damsel in distress is enough for Ash to disregard all of his standard procedures and risk everything. A strong concept that needed more padding to stay interesting.