Relay: Riz Ahmed proves an enigmatic action hero in this slick tech thriller

Relay is a service provided for speech-impaired users who wish to make phone calls – messages typed into a device are relayed verbally by an operator to the recipient. But in the 21^st century, why not send a text message? A particular advantage of Relay is that the system offers client confidentiality. Calls can’t be traced, logged or tapped. Ash, played with tight-lipped charisma by Riz Ahmed, uses Relay to protect his clients against powerful, malicious forces who can’t be trusted to keep an agreement unless they’re more afraid of the side effects of screwing up a deal – their secrets becoming public knowledge – than confident they’ll get away with it. 

In a brief, effective prologue, a battered, end-of-his-tether potential whistleblower (Matthew Maher) returns incriminating documents to a CEO (Victor Garber) in a diner then makes a getaway by train. This sequence establishes Ash’s MO. He is always in the background, invisible as a security guard or cycle messenger, but never meets parties in the deals he brokers. 

Then, inevitably, he takes another case, hired by desperate scientist Sarah (Lily James). Ash finds his new stubborn opponents put a hit squad in the field against him and is persuaded to break his own rules about not getting personally involved with the client when the understandably out-of-her-depth Sarah makes basic errors. Accustomed to working at one remove, mostly by typing, he has to get on the ground and run (or cycle) around New York coping with crises.

Written by Justin Piasecki and directed by David Mackenzie (who made 2016’s Hell or High Water), Relay is an effective conspiracy thriller with a resourceful, enigmatic hero using spy-like tradecraft to improvise as a simple plan goes out of whack. Like the surveillance expert of The Conversation (1974), Ash is a buttoned-down hollow man – though Ahmed is in better shape than Gene Hackman, setting up Ash’s mid-film switch from techie to action hero. Ash uses Relay so often and has no one in his life to talk to, so it’s almost a surprise half an hour in when we find that he can actually speak. 

In the enemy camp, Sam Worthington, always better as a villain than a hero, and Willa Fitzgerald, from Strange Darling (2023), are all the more formidable for not having an explanation for what they do. A late-in-the-plot twist serves to shake the hero’s cool detachment even further, but is in keeping with a genre format which requires the audience as well as the hero to pay attention and trust no one.

► Relay is in UK cinemas from 31 October.