By Robert Scucci
| Published 21 seconds ago

2024’s Relay taught me something very important about myself that I still don’t know how to process. If I were ever caught between an evil corporation that wanted to kill me for leaking damaging information, forcing me to contact a third-party agency to return missing documents in exchange for my silence, it wouldn’t take long before I’d be found dead in a garbage can somewhere. While I think I’m pretty smart when it comes to navigating adult life, I’m a visual learner, and I’m simply not built to follow elaborate instructions delivered through a burner phone without immediately messing up how I’m supposed to carry myself based on those instructions.

While I’m admittedly not bright enough to navigate a massive conspiracy that could kill millions of people through its coverup, Ash (Riz Ahmed) and Sarah Grant (Lily James) are up to the challenge, and they know they have to act fast. If it were me in either of their shoes, I’d try my best, but I’m telling you now I would mess something like this up so quickly that everybody would wonder why I was ever perceived as a threat in the first place.

A Reverse Whistle Blow 

Relay’s conflict is complicated, but it’s easy to digest because its stakes are laid out with clarity from the start. We’re introduced to Sarah Grant, a former employee of Cybo Sementis Research Institutes. Sarah is in danger and knows she’s being tracked by company operatives Dawson (Sam Worthington), Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald), Ryan (Jared Abrahamson), and Lee (Pun Bandhu).

She’s constantly looking over her shoulder because she knows the genetically modified strain of wheat their company synthesized has deadly consequences. Her concerns are brushed aside because the company is on the verge of a billion-dollar merger built around that very product. After stealing hundreds of pages of documents when they attempted to buy her silence, Sarah starts having second thoughts. She fears she won’t live long enough to leak the information in any meaningful way before they get to her and decides to back down in exchange for peace.

Desperate for an out, Sarah agrees to return the documents and keep her mouth shut as long as Dawson and his team stops tailing her. She reaches out to Tri-State Relay Service, run anonymously by Ash, because the company specializes in rectifying the exact kind of situation Sarah finds herself in.

The phone calls between Sarah and the relay service are facilitated by Ash, who communicates through a burner phone hooked up to a specialized keyboard system meant for the hearing impaired. If Sarah fails to follow instructions to the letter, Tri-State Relay Service will drop her as a client, leaving her on her own once again.

Why You Should Never Pursue Romance When Compromised

The only contact Sarah has with Ash in Relay is indirect. Either she calls the service, or they call her. There’s an elaborate system of codewords and protocol that involves shipping packages to specific addresses and destroying her phone after every exchange. Through these interactions, Ash grows sympathetic to Sarah’s predicament, and he lets his guard down at the worst possible time. Their daily check-ins start to feel less professional, and Ash gets sloppy just as the folks from Cybo Sementis begin closing in.

As Relay progresses, both Sarah and Ash lose sight of who they can trust. The entire operation becomes an exercise in paranoia, mistaken identity, and corporate impropriety that could compromise countless lives. Ash is driven by guilt, which rears its ugly head once things begin to heat up. Before helping people like Sarah, he had been paid for silence under similar circumstances in a previous professional life, and he starts to question whether following through with the document exchange that sparked this relationship is the right move.

Relay has a lot of moving parts, but it never feels convoluted. While Ash and Sarah are far more coordinated than I would ever be in this situation, I enjoyed it as a form of wish fulfillment for that reason alone. I’d love to receive instructions, snap my phone in half, and run through an alley toward a safe house, but I’d probably jot down the wrong address, panic, and give up before I even hear the dial tone.

Relay is currently streaming on Netflix.