Tom, Riz Ahmed’s single-named protagonist in the moody thriller Relay, is adept at disappearing in crowds. He seldom speaks and is a master of disguise, whether masquerading around cities and airports as a Muslim cleric, a beat cop, a construction worker. His default is that of a phantom in a hoodie — an urban ninja eluding the prying cameras of even the most determined surveillance state.
Tom’s job, murky and dark web-ish, requires such stealth. He’s a clandestine broker between whistleblowers carrying damaging secrets and the corporations that want them silenced. He considers both the company and the rogue employee his clients, and when all parties follow his labyrinthine instructions, the compromising information never leaks, and only money — not violence — is exchanged.
Tom protects himself in his extralegal venture primarily through the Tri-State Relay Service, a telecommunications solution for the deaf and hard of hearing. All correspondence between clients is routed through this public service, in which Tom types his instructions into a portable word processor attached to a cellphone and transmits them through various operators. The benefit is that all information exchanged through the relay service is confidential, and no call records are kept. (The Tri-State Relay Service is an invention of the filmmakers, but such services do exist in all 50 states.)
Tom’s latest client, Sarah Grant (Lily James), will push his methodology to the brink. A research scientist, she absconded with damaging information from her former employer, a Monsanto-like biotech company, that reveals the toxic side effects of its genetically modified wheat. She’s being pursued by the company’s henchmen, who shadow her every movement from an unmarked van. And for a certain lonely broker, she also happens to be a comely and conveniently single damsel in distress.
Relay has earned comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock, who pioneered the two-characters-on-the-run romantic thriller. Certainly, Relay contains its share of MacGuffins and bait-and-switch plot developments. But a better callback, given the film’s gritty urban textures, is John Frankenheimer, with a healthy dose of Jean-Pierre Melville’s atmospheric neo-noirs. Alain Delon’s iconic Jef Costello, in the latter’s Le Samouraï, is the prototypical antecedent for methodical obsessives such as Tom.
Relay’s director is Scotland’s David Mackenzie, a prolific artisan but hardly an auteur. He has directed literary adaptations and sex comedies, Westerns and romances and thrillers and period pieces. His lack of a signature style makes him something like Tom in Relay, sporting whatever generic headgear meets the moment. The local color and wry humor that helped propel Mackenzie’s strongest film, Hell or High Water, for instance, is largely absent from Relay, which hews to the life-or-death gravity of Tom’s tradecraft. But with pacing this skillful, and the serpentine plotting this compelling, you don’t miss it.
There comes a point, however, as the movie’s cat-and-mouse seductions begin to blur, that Relay telegraphs its hand, its poker face slipping. Discerning viewers will glean its big reveal well in advance, rendering the movie’s climax, larded with simplistic shoot-’em-up scenes, the only slog in an otherwise airtight thriller.
Ultimately, Relay may well be remembered not for the cloaks, daggers and misdirections of its plot but for its proud defense of humble city services. The relay service that allows Tom to communicate covertly isn’t the only public agency in which he avails himself. He researches his cases on library computers, and rides on public transportation. The United States Postal Service proves vital throughout Relay. At a time of continued hemorrhaging of public-sector employees, and with the specter of privatization a daily ambient threat, an apolitical picture like this still feels apropos of the zeitgeist. Even urban ninjas can’t do everything on their own.
RELAY. Director: David Mackenzie; Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Victor Garber; Distributor: Bleecker Street; Rated R; Now playing at Regal Royal Palm Beach, Movies of Lake Worth, CMX Cinemas Wellington, Cinepolis Luxury Cinemas Jupiter, Movies of Delray, Cinemark Bistro Boca Raton and VIP Shadowood Boca Raton