Riz Ahmed in David Mackenzie’s Whistleblower Thriller

A striking legacy of 9/11 is how the United States government exploited national grief and panic to pass aggressive legislation stripping Americans of privacy rights. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, also known as the Patriot Act, was passed in October 2001, 45 days after the Twin Towers fell, and gave the government “roving surveillance authority.” Agents wouldn’t need a warrant to tap email communications or phone calls, or to monitor credit reports and banking history. Cloaked in the language of safety, the Patriot Act turned every person into a suspect. In the decades since, Americans have become so used to forfeiting privacy that we willingly opt-in to technologies and resources asking for data. 

The sweeping power of the surveillance state looms large in David Mackenzie’s gritty thriller Relay, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars Riz Ahmed as Ash, an off-the-grid technologist who brokers deals between whistleblowers and endangered companies. He helps individuals second-guessing their desire to expose their employers, by facilitating the return of stolen documents and other evidence of corporate malfeasance. Ash does all this using methods that maintain his anonymity: a messaging relay service that helps people who are deaf, hard of hearing or have speech issues to communicate; the United States postal office, which despite its frustrated bureaucracy holds user data close; and by only using cash and burner phones.

Relay pays homage to a once-ubiquitous kind of action thriller defined by its brisk pace and satisfying mystery. It’s also an exciting New York film. Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, Outlaw King) trades overused establishing shots of the cityscape or a bustling Grand Central for comparatively less familiar glimpses of a Lower East Side marked by signs of gentrification and the still-steely corners of Myrtle-Broadway in Brooklyn. The director also pays close attention to how Ash stays anonymous in our age of privacy as a luxury good, shooting the protagonist’s process with the same nail-biting intensity as more conventional high-pursuit action sequences. 

The film opens with Ash brokering another whistleblower deal with Hoffman (Matthew Maher), a former employee of Optimal Pharmaceuticals, a corporation whose reputation sounds a lot like Purdue Pharma’s. Creeping shots of a meeting between the nervous middle manager and his CEO (Victor Garber) establish the paranoid atmosphere of Relay. The exchange goes off without a hitch, freeing Hoffman, who absconds to a safehouse in Poughkeepsie, from a pair of goons hired to follow and intimidate him. We see Ash, a methodical and distant figure, return to his workspace where he locks the file in a safe. 

Just as soon as one case closes, another opens. At the center of Relay is an increasingly dangerous cat-and-mouse chase between Ash and the agricultural company menacing his latest client, Sarah (Lily James). She’s a senior researcher in a constant state of agita after stealing a multi-hundred page report that reveals her former employers knowingly sell a fertilizer laced with toxic chemicals. Sarah, like Hoffman, thought about going to the police or leaking the information to newspapers, but escalating intimidation tactics from the firm changed her mind. After unsuccessfully trying to get a lawyer, she’s referred by an attorney to Ash’s unusual service. 

The best parts of Relay harness the details of Ash’s brokerage. Mackenzie’s direction is never tighter than when he’s focused on message relays, burner phones and the bureaucracy of the post office. Slick costume changes by Ash, as he guides Sarah through the process of paying him the $50,000 fee and sending him the original copies of the report, play up the racism of the surveillance state and the corporations. Often Ash, a brown man in a post-9/11 New York, hides in plain sight, dressed casually as a delivery worker or jogger running through the city. He rarely interacts with people, except to attend Alcoholic Anonymous meetings or visit his fake ID guy.

Ahmed excels in this role which requires his character to communicate a range of emotions — confident swagger to anxious focus — with few words. By nature of Relay, which is focused on how a man flies under the radar, Ash can be a distant character. But Ahmed’s performance has flashes of intimacy that become more commonplace the closer the fixer gets to his client. 

While it’s nice to see more vulnerable sides of Ash, they also reveal the weakness of Relay. As Ash gets closer to Sarah, Justin Piasecki’s screenplay edges into a kind of implausible and overly sentimental arena. Part of the trouble stems from pacing — his relationship to Sarah doesn’t have much time to develop. The clip of this burgeoning friendship not only tips off some of the film’s twists, but it also disappointingly forecloses more interesting narrative directions, especially when it comes to observing the omnipresent surveillance culture. Ash also makes decisions that seem antithetical to his character, becoming trusting in a manner that feels remarkably naive for such an admirably scrupulous figure. That kind of change, however well-intentioned, blunts the edge of an otherwise gripping thriller, and ultimately results in a deflating conclusion misaligned with our paranoia.