The 2025 thriller film by David Mackenzie, Relay, tries to bring back the feel of highly intense old crime thrillers with tight editing and a plot featuring unexpected twists and turns, and manages to pull off part of its intended plan. The plot, about a covert fixer named Ash, who usually brokers deals between whistleblowers and the companies they have targeted, ultimately does not live up to the potential that it initially had. Overall, Relay is quite enjoyable as a one-time watch, although no satisfying depth with regard to the plot or the characters should really be expected from it.
Spoiler Alert
What is the show about?
Relay begins with the protagonist, Ash, in the middle of his peculiar job, as part of which he disguises himself as a construction worker and waits at a diner, pretending to just be on a break from work. In reality, he waits for a man named Hoffman to arrive at the diner and meet with another man, McVie, with the intention of ensuring that nothing goes wrong during this meeting. Ash’s extremely specialized profession involves helping whistleblowers settle their accounts with the corporates that they gather information against, and ensuring that the evil corporates do not end up harming them. It is quite common for whistleblowers to be threatened and intimidated by their ex-employers into deciding to cancel their plans of going public with the explosive news that they have collected. But in such cases, the whistleblowers also have to fear being harmed, and possibly even killed, by their corrupt ex-bosses, and would need someone to ensure that no such harm comes to them.
It is in these instances that the whistleblowers hire the services of Ash, who guides them through the whole ordeal via anonymous phone calls held through a relay service. After being contacted by the clients first, Ash calls them back via relay service, which is a kind of telecommunications service meant to let persons with hearing, speech, and vision disabilities communicate with non-impaired people. Ash also uses a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) to ensure that the conversation remains entirely private, as per the protocols of the relay service. He uses the TDD to type in his responses, which are then read out to the client by an employee of the Tri-State Relay Service company. It is in this manner that he had come into contact with Hoffman, who had sensitive information about the Optimo pharmaceutical company, and after initially having wanted to go public with it, had by now decided to just give in and put the matter to rest.
Thus, Ash brokers a deal between Hoffman and the CEO of Optimo, McVie, ensuring that the corporation gets back their confidential documents, and in exchange promises not to hurt or punish Hoffman for his actions. He also ensures that his client leaves the city under a new identity and manages to start a new life somewhere else. Soon after the successful completion of the mission, Ash receives another call, from a woman named Sarah Grant, who is also in desperate need of his services after being turned down by a number of law firms. Sarah had also acquired confidential files from her ex-employers at Cybo Sementis Research Institute, but has now decided to reach an agreement with them after being stalked and threatened by them for months. Therefore, she needs the help of Ash, and after a quick background check, he agrees to take up the job.
How does Ash manage to dupe Dawson and his team?
Ash soon learns more details about Sarah and the danger that she currently faces because of her findings at the Cybo Sementis Research Institute, which had been researching genetically modified wheat for quite some time. The company had even come up with products based on genetically modified wheat and had started selling them in poorer countries as an alternative to more expensive wheat, but Sarah had discovered that the research also showed the products had extensive side effects that could be fatal in the long run. The corporation had intentionally withheld this information to ensure that its products would sell, but Sarah had stolen the documents proving the side effects and threatened to expose them to the public, with the pure intention of helping the common people know what they were consuming.
However, she was hounded by her ex-employers, who kept sending people after her to scare and intimidate her. The company had hired a group of mercenaries, led by a man named Dawson, specifically to follow Sarah around, find the file of confidential documents that she had stolen, and retrieve it at any cost. Therefore, when Sarah appoints Ash to conduct negotiations on her behalf, he has to directly face Dawson and his team, but has to first identify the men and women before establishing communications with them. In order to do this, and also to ensure his client’s safety, Ash lays down a trap for Dawson, knowing very well that he is constantly surveilling Sarah’s calls and is also keeping an eye on her at all times.
Ash makes Sarah put the documents that she had stolen into an envelope, along with an amount of 50,000 dollars, as a sort of safety deposit for him, which would be returned once he can get hold of the money from the corporates. She is then asked to take two flights, first to Pittsburgh, and then to Atlanta, but the reason for this long journey is not made clear to her. There are two major reasons behind Ash’s plan—firstly, he wants Sarah to mail him the envelopes from a post office inside the security gates of an airport so that nobody without a boarding pass would be able to get to her, and the Pittsburgh airport has one of the very last post offices behind the security gates. Secondly, Ash knows that Sarah’s calls are being tapped, and so he wants Dawson and his team to believe that she will be traveling to Atlanta, while in reality she never takes the flight from Pittsburgh.
At the Pittsburgh airport, Ash himself participates in the mission under disguise, and helps divert the team of pursuers, allowing Sarah to get to the post office and mail the envelopes before slipping out of the airport altogether. He has Sarah mail two packages, one of which is a fake decoy, with the other containing the documents and the money. Ash also manages to make use of the loopholes of the US Postal Service to forward the original package to an address different from the original one mentioned while being posted by Sarah. This ensures that none of Dawson’s crew members can find a trace of the original address, even though they have the details of the postal codes used by Sarah. This sly trap also lets Ash identify all the members of the team, and he soon establishes contact with the CEO of Cybo Sementis, demanding a payoff of 500,000 dollars in exchange for the confidential documents. The company agrees to this deal, and even sends him the money, but Dawson and his team are also instructed to retrieve the documents by themselves in the meanwhile.
What happens to Hoffman?
While Ash continues to iron out Sarah’s situation, more details about Hoffman and the Optimo pharmaceutical company are revealed. The man had found out the secret about a successful pill that Optimo had made and then sold in large quantities all over the world. Despite being of great effect in the short run, because of which it became such a financial success for the company, the pills were actually causing immense physical harm to those taking them in the long run. Hoffman had planned on exposing this secret to the world, not just to warn the people who were unknowingly getting affected by the situation, but also to pull off the mask of Optimo Pharmaceutical and expose it to be the cruel and criminal corporation that it actually was. However, Hoffman had ultimately succumbed to the cruel demands of his ex-employers, as they had blackmailed and scared him beyond his threshold, which had made him change his mind about exposing the truth to the world. While he had hired the service of Ash and successfully handed back all the documents to Optimo, the guilt of essentially being a cowardly sellout who understandably chose his own safety and security over the millions of people being affected by the harmful pills lived on in his mind. As a result, Hoffman sends one last voicemail to Ash, in which he is seemingly thinking about ending his own life, after being unable to bear this tremendous guilt. Although no confirmation about the matter is provided, it is suggested that Hoffman takes his own life by the end of the film, news of which affects Ash as well.
Why had Sarah really hired Ash?
In Relay’s ending, the biggest twist in the plot is revealed when we learn that Sarah had had a very different intention behind hiring the services of Ash, and that she was not actually the helpless whistleblower that she had been claiming to be. All the information that Ash could find about Sarah on the internet only pointed to the fact that she had been working for the Cybo Sementis Research Institute, in addition to a few videos of her contribution to the project with genetically modified wheat. All of this confirmed her backstory, and there was naturally no proof of the fact that she had turned into a whistleblower to undo all the wrongs of her employers, since these matters are usually kept confidential until the company secrets themselves are exposed to the public. Therefore, Ash had found no reason to suspect Sarah’s claims or her story, and towards the end of the film, when she says that she is about to walk into a trap set by Dawson, he rushes to her rescue as well. However, it is then revealed that Sarah had been working as the top boss of Dawson, and it had all been a trap to corner Ash and find the exact location of the safehouse where he kept copies of the confidential documents from the cases that he worked on. In order to ensure that the corporate bosses would not actually turn their back on the deal and end up harming the whistleblowers, Ash kept a copy of the confidential documents with him as one last precaution for the sake of the whistleblowers. It was his protocol, as clearly stated to both parties, that he would immediately expose the documents to the police and the media if the whistleblower was found to have died under mysterious circumstances.
This protocol had been in play in the case of Optimo as well, when Ash had kept a copy of the pharmaceutical company’s secrets safely locked away in his locker. However, the leaders of Optimo were not prepared to take the risk of letting Hoffman live, as they feared that he could still reveal the company’s secrets to the public, since he had been a crucial part of the research behind the pills. Having him killed was not an option just yet, since Ash would have immediately sent the documents to the police and the media in such a case, and their plan of hushing up their true intentions would have failed. Thus, they needed to get hold of the copy of their confidential documents first, and in order to do so, they needed to corner Ash and get him to reveal the location of his secret safehouse. The plan had always been for Sarah to get close to the protagonist, feign romantic feelings for him, and create a fake scenario in which Dawson would threaten to kill Sarah if Ash did not reveal the location. This is exactly what happens, and the protagonist’s secret stash is finally found.
What happens to Ash and the money?
Despite this grand betrayal, Ash manages to keep his cool and composure, and when made to punch in the code to enter the vault, he intentionally puts in the wrong code thrice to trigger a fire, and he manages to escape the building. Although Sarah and her men soon catch up to him, because of his serious injuries, a previous decision of Ash ultimately ends up saving him. The protagonist had also been struggling to get over his alcoholism, because of which he had even become a part of an Alcoholics Anonymous group. Incidentally, a woman named Wash had decided to be his sponsor at this group, and she happened to be a detective in the New York Police Department. Thus, when Ash had believed that Sarah was in real danger after having been abducted by Dawson, and he had decided to completely uproot his life and leave behind his profession of being a mediator between whistleblowers and their enemies, he had decided to tell everything to Wash. Sensing that the villains must be after his safehouse containing the confidential documents, Ash had asked Wash to come to the place with her unit, and this is exactly what happens. Everyone at the spot, except for one woman working for Dawson, Rosetti, is arrested by the police, and Ash tells Wash that he trusts her to do the correct thing with the confidential documents.
After a few days, Ash is seen to have recovered from his injuries, despite still bearing physical wounds from the intense experience. He now himself travels to Poughkeepsie, seemingly under a new identity to start a new life, just like he earlier helped his clients do. He now receives the 500,000 dollars that the authorities at Cybo Sementis had sent him in order to retrieve their confidential documents from Sarah. In reality, this money had been sent by Optimo to secure the copy of their file. But now, the corporation had failed in keeping the truth about their pills a secret, as Wash had handed over the files to the media, who had extensively reported on the matter, as spotted by Ash in an online article. Thus, he decides to not use the money for himself either, and mails it to the office of the Tri-State Relay Service company as a donation to its employees, without whom the very premise of Relay would have been impossible.
