Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
It’s been roughly six years since David Mackenzie went upstairs at the TIFF Lightbox and chopped some 40 minutes out of Outlaw King, which might be the strangest possible fate that an opening-night gala premiere has had at the festival. That movie did two things: First, it made it possible for me to make a pun about Chris Pine’s nude scene in the headline; second, it brought Mackenzie back to Earth following the smash-hit success of Hell or High Water, the Taylor Sheridan-penned outlaw drama that very nearly swept the Oscars and offered a pretty swell preview of what your parents would be watching on the Paramount Network each week (if you want a picture of who’s still paying for cable, well, God bless them, it’s the Yellowstone audience; sports fans owe you our thanks). Up to that point, Mackenzie mainly had been working within the borders of his island nation, producing the occasional critical hit (Young Adam) or oddity (Starred Up) as well as a lot of interesting yet disappointing movies (Perfect Sense, which, despite being the perfect movie for Covid times, never outran Contagion because it was just too mellow). He’d even tried to cross over to American audiences back in 2009 with the Aston Kutcher vehicle Spread, but that went nowhere. But Sheridan’s superb script was made all the more magical by his sturdy competence behind the camera, and it was electric. It seemed he could go anywhere, so he returned to Scotland, this time with Pine in tow to play a legendary Scotsman. It was a bad idea, and six years after absorbing those lessons, Mackenzie’s back with Relay, another film about hyper-competent men and those who pursue them.
Unlike Outlaw King, which saw Mackenzie double as writer-director, Relay was penned by Justin Piasecki and made the Black List before getting picked up. One can pretty quickly see why it stood out in the slush pile: It’s got an easy-to-parse logline and a decently clever way of executing it. The elevator pitch is such: Tom (Riz Ahmed) acts as a middleman between large corporations and would-be whistleblowers – the corporations want their documents back, and the whistleblowers want the harassment they’re getting from the goons the corpos hired to stop. The film opens with the end of Ahmed’s latest case: A secretive meeting at a diner, observed by Tom in construction worker camouflage, attended by a bruised former employee and a prominent pharma company’s CEO. The documents are exchanged, pictures are taken, and both parties go on their separate ways. Case closed. All are satisfied. It’s his next job, however, that will truly push him to his limits. Sarah (Lily James), a top scientist at an agricultural research firm, fled with documents about a faulty crop strain and wants the assholes trailing her, who are led by Sam Worthington, to stop bothering her. She got his number from a lawyer, and she’s surprised by the nature of his return call: It’s through a relay service.
If you don’t have a deaf or hard-of-hearing family member or friend, relay services help with over-the-phone communication for those with auditory handicaps. A caller types a message on a little device; the relay operator reads it to the person on the other end of the line and then transcribes and transmits their response, which the caller can read on their device’s screen. It’s a dope service, made even more dope by the fact that none of their call logs or information are stored, which makes it a perfect and anonymous method of communication for a guy who needs privacy as much as Tom does. So, through the relay service, Tom coaches Sarah through the next few days: she’ll need to follow some odd instructions – perhaps take a flight or two to some strange locations – and she’ll need to get rid of her old cell phone and stick to a burner from here on out. Meanwhile, Tom’s scoping out the men following her, with his anonymity being a significant asset – all he has to do is put on a fake beard or mustache, and no one’s the wiser. It looks easy unless his cover is blown or he grows too attached to his client. And – you guessed it – both options are on the table here.
Relay works best when it’s mainly about Ahmed’s stoic fixer going about his business in near-silence, be it haunting the Jersey warehouse where he stores all of his case files and gear like a Garden State Batman, or giving off Schrader protagonist vibes, penning his notes in his quiet Chinatown apartment, with a store-bought salad instead of three fingers of bourbon at arm’s length. His interactions with James are compelling until they get a little sappy, and his dealings with Worthington and company are fun (there’s nothing better than watching Worthington get frustrated because the dude’s got a face that was meant to be glimpsed mid-rage while he’s smashing a cellphone on the floor).
It’s only until we hit the third act, when things truly fall apart, that the film starts to sputter out. The entire narrative hinges upon this man’s competence at his job, showing us a whole safe full of prior successes, and we’re expected to believe that this is the work that finally causes him to give up his op-sec. Piasecki renders him mostly mute for the duration of his appearances on screen, so we never get close enough for his change of heart to land in a meaningful way, no matter how well Ahmed’s able to play up his loneliness or how many times he speaks up at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he attends. This problem is compounded by an obvious twist, which has a decent pay-off but feels a bit forced as if Piasecki and Mackenzie knew there wouldn’t be a movie to make out of this story without a swerve.
I can see how one might call Relay slight, as there’s not a ton on the bone besides the conceit – you’re either with the movie’s flow and can accept its trade-offs, or you can’t. Still, it’s clever enough for long enough to be absorbing and compelling, regardless of how it shakes out. The climb’s decent, even if the clouds near the mountaintop may ruin the view. But Mackenzie seems to understand his Hollywood niche better than when he did with Outlaw King – his talents are best applied in service of clever clockwork narratives like this than in grandly-designed epics, where he gets lost in the chaos of productions that are unable to stop and appreciate the minutiae. So while it’s not a return to the High Water-mark, Relay’s wave is still pretty far above the low tide, and well-worth the ride.