Relay movie review: Satisfying thriller reminds us of what we’ve lost

In the 1993 screen adaptation of John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, Julia Roberts plays a woman on the run.

Darby Shaw barely survives a car bombing, her home is ransacked and she hides out from a nefarious assassin trying to silence her because of a conspiracy she accidentally uncovered.

The Pelican Brief is kind of a cheesy story but it is wholly satisfying as a movie-watching experience – and it’s the kind of film the industry doesn’t make that much anymore, especially for cinema.

Now there’s Relay, a spiritual successor to The Pelican Brief and a genre that used to provide so many twisty thrills only three decades earlier. Not everything needs to be a TV show or a franchise springboard, and too many people have forgotten this.

Directed by Brit David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, Young Adam) and starring Brits Riz Ahmed and Lily James and Australian Sam Worthington in a New York-based story, Relay is a solid, genuinely engaging popcorn thriller that will make you miss the era when more of these films existed.

Sarah (James) is a scientist who used to work for a company that produced genetically modified wheat but was fired when she came across a report that revealed adverse health effects, and raised it up the chain.

On her way out, she took (technically, stole) a copy of the report and had considered whistleblowing, but then the harassment started. Her car was set on fire, and she moved out of her home.

Seeking help, she is introduced to a mysterious fixer (Ahmed), who acts as a middle-man that brokers a deal between someone with damning information and the dodgy company who wants to keep it secret.

It’s the fixer’s job to ensure everyone gets what they want and no one is hurt. He communicates through a complex system involving a relay phone service, and Sarah never sees him or even hears his voice.

Worthington plays the head of a “security” team that is tracking Sarah and despite assurances that they will cooperate with the pending deal, try to foil the fixer’s plans.

Part of the joy of Relay is the complexity of the fixer’s system and how he outsmarts the security team’s multi-pronged attempts to catch him or intercepts the documents. There are ruses galore involving airports, post office boxes, disguises and a tense set-piece in Times Square.

Meanwhile, the bond between Sarah and the fixer deepens, as it tends to do in these Hollywood situations, and the question is asked, will he be able to keep her at an arm’s length as just a client?

Relay isn’t trying to be super fancy, it knows exactly the kind of movie it is and it delivers. It plays within the genre beats with its pacy plot and structure, and is suspenseful without being stressful.

It has a twist that is something of a contrivance but makes 95 per cent sense when it’s revealed – you’re not going to be mad about it.

Mackenzie, who directed the superb 206 Taylor Sheridan-scripted Hell or High Water neo-western, knows how to piece together a pulsing set-piece, and while Relay doesn’t have the heart-in-your-throat tension of his best work, it never loses your attention.

It also gives Ahmed a bit more to do than play the veiled figure who utters barely a line in the first two acts. The character is slowly peeled back with slivers of a backstory which converges with Relay’s climactic beats.

Ahmed is also an incredibly sympathetic performer who can do a lot with just how he physically carries a character, and the role needed someone of his talent so that audiences can latch onto someone who is, by design, a mystery.

Relay is what is rarely served anymore - a contained, two-hour thriller that is a meal in itself. You will walk away satiated.

Rating: 3.5/5

Relay is in cinemas on August 21