There are a lot of great movies about whistleblowers—On the Waterfront, of course. Serpico. The Insider. Dark Waters, more recently. What you don’t see so often are movies about would-be whistleblowers who change their minds and don’t do anything. And that’s because it’s a stupid idea.
The new thriller Relay doesn’t seem to think so though, and so we start off with Ash, played by Riz Ahmed, who’s sort of a facilitator between people who want to return the incriminating documents they hold to the giant corporations they were going to expose, for a tidy sum, of course. Which I guess means now they’re just extortionists? Not that I feel bad for the corporations. Sarah comes to him with just such a situation, or I should say Ash comes to her, using a text-to-operator telephone relay system designed for deaf people. Neither Ash nor Sarah is deaf, but according to the movie, by law, no records can be kept of relay conversations, making their interactions entirely private. Why Sarah is so credulous that the voice on the other end of her phone is actually a relay operator isn’t entirely clear, and whether this is really the best way to conduct business also isn’t clear, but this conceit does set up the possibility of a 1970s-style paranoid crime thriller a la The Conversation. The “possibility,” I say, because it doesn’t really do anything with that, either. The relay system is used throughout the film, but it never becomes anything more than an idea someone had for a movie.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Not great, actually. The movie, and especially the exterior shots, look uncomfortably glossy. The twist that ultimately caps the film is both something we have considered might happen throughout the movie and also something that mostly renders everything else we’ve seen to be nonsense. Despite Riz Ahmed’s considerable talents, he’s allowed essentially one flat expression for the entire runtime. And ultimately none of the attempts at suspense work either—one scene in a concert hall gives us hope of a De Palma- or even Hitchcock-esque climax, only to play out quickly and without any real artistry or consequence. And maybe worst of all, the magnificent Schubert piece being played on stage sounds awful.
Look, I understand in real life the decision to become a whistleblower or not is exceptionally fraught, so each person has to make their own decision. But in a movie? Give me Karen Silkwood every time.
Relay is in theaters.
