Go Ahead: David Mackenzie’s “Relay” redefines the action-thriller genre with a unique plot

No callers identified. 

No conversations recorded. 

No phone records kept. 

You’ve been told to expect this call. It’s for your own survival.

The recently released film “Relay” follows Ashraf, played by Riz Ahmed, a recovering alcoholic and former Wall Street Banker, who helps whistleblowers negotiate the return of incriminating evidence to the company they took it from. 

In exchange for not releasing the evidence to news sources and law enforcement agencies, Ashraf returns the evidence to the company. 

To protect his identity, Ashraf receives clients only through referrals and communicates via a switchboard created for the deaf: The Tri-State Relay Service. He types his responses to the operator, who reads them to his clients. 

“Relay” was carefully curated, full of detail and exposed the flaws in every past clichéd spy movie. Instead of following some bumbling private investigator on a mission to save a kidnapped client or the CIA stakeout in a camouflaged plumbing van, it took me on a journey of personal development and the blurry line between right and wrong.   

It focuses on one client, Sarah Grant, a former biotech employee who was working on an insect-resistant strain of wheat that had horrific side effects. Shortly after bringing the evidence to her bosses, she was fired. 

After the company discovered that Grant stole copies of the incriminating documents, they hired trained mercenaries to track her every move. 

It felt like the “mysterious” deaths of past drug cartel informants. It's super mysterious when someone stands to make millions by hiding the truth. 

As Ashraf tries to help Sarah, his identity begins to unravel and Sarah becomes his worst client. Seemingly, by incompetence. 

Ashraf ends up staring down the barrel of a Sig Sauer P229, and only by the grace of smoke and mirror-style stall tactics, he evades capture as the whole crew of bad guys stop dead in their tracks. That is, before being arrested, by none other than his sponsor and friend, Wash. 

The attention to detail in every second of the 1-hour and 52-minute film mirrors the thrill of only Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” — a 1954 cinematic masterpiece with a 99% rotten tomatoes rating.  

Relay’s director, David Mackenzie, mastered the cinematography of an omniscient third person, making you look over your shoulder for an unmarked gray van. There wasn’t a second of this movie where I didn’t feel like someone was camped out in my driveway with a camera trained on the floor-to-ceiling windows of my room. 

The character complexity was both compelling and very plausible. Mackenzie mastered the psychological profile of Ashraf.

With a niche plot, “Relay” was a fresh take on a widely competitive genre of action thriller movies. 

Mackenzie saw the trap that the majority of terrible action movies fall into — the basic spy with his handler, his girlfriend, the hacker and the muscle. Instead, Mackenzie went for a nuanced, highly cryptic movie that ended with a lot of questions. 

Questions that I believe can only be answered with a proper sequel. 

So if you watched “Relay,” join me in proposing a sequel to every major media company headquartered in the United States.