Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures. No surprise, it’s from Scottish director David Mackenzie, whose filmography is one lean near-masterpiece after another, with the terrific 2016 neo-Western crime drama “Hell or High Water” a standout.
On top of that, “Relay” stars Riz Ahmed, the rare film talent who can hold the screen by doing absolutely nothing, his big, watchful eyes conveying a mind ferociously at work. Ahmed plays “Jon” – it’s almost certainly not his real name – who’s a New York-based fixer for a very specific clientele: corporate whistleblowers who’ve chickened out. We first see him arranging a meeting between a smug CEO (Victor Garber) and an intimidated former employee (Matthew Maher). The CEO gets his incriminating documents returned, Jon keeps a copy in his safe for insurance (plus payment from both parties) and the employee gets his life back.
It’s a sweet little operation, and the best part is that Jon remains invisible throughout, issuing his instructions to both sides via an untraceable telephone relay service so that his voice is never heard. The character has something in him of Harry Caul – the reclusive surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” – and we glean just enough from Jon’s regular visits to his AA group to sense that loneliness is his necessary armor.
But there’s always a woman, isn’t there, and here it’s Sarah Grant (Lily James of “Downton Abbey” and “Baby Driver”), a scientist on the run from a team of corporate thugs after lifting a damaging suppressed report from the agribusiness she used to work for. Reaching Jon through the relay service – whose anonymous employees read the text that he types into a teleprinter for the deaf – Sarah is given baroquely detailed directions designed to smoke out her pursuers, ensure her safety and ultimately set up the handoff.
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The best scenes by far in “Relay” are the three-way cat-and-mouse games set in motion by Jon’s directives, with fake-outs at Pittsburgh International Airport serving as a delicious early highlight. The villains are a black ops team of outsourced HR department hoodlums led by Dawson (Sam Worthington), who’s as sharp in his way as Jon is and who’s cheered by having a worthy enemy for once. As a director, Mackenzie is heir to Howard Hawks, Sydney Pollack and other masters of no-frills filmmaking, and “Relay” is, for much of its running time, a fascinating action film about process. Jon is the only character on screen who has the whole picture in his head, and we follow his feints and settings of bear traps with the awe reserved for true professionals, the ones who don’t have to talk to get things done.
At the mid-movie mark, the characters start deepening, and Ahmed makes Jon’s gradual reemergence into the light a moving thing indeed. It would be easy for “Relay” to start getting soggy around now, but it stays true to the idea of two scared people working up the nerve to talk to each other in actual audio and maybe even in person. There’s a tenderness at this movie’s core that’s never overplayed. It’s just there.
The script by first-timer Justin Piasecki isn’t brilliant, but it doesn’t need to be; it just has to provide a scaffold for Mackenzie’s to-the-point storytelling. An example is a mid-movie scene in Times Square, where Jon and Sarah have to improvise a document drop while Dawson’s goons scramble to ID their opponent. A lesser filmmaker might make hash of the various bits of business unfolding amid the bustling crowd of locals and tourists, but Mackenzie, with the aid of cinematographer Giles Nuttgens and editor Matt Mayer, keeps it clear and bold as a New York Post headline.
That said, hints of B-movie cheapness lurk in Tony Doogan’s synth-based score, and even Mackenzie can’t save “Relay” from a formulaic twist that squanders the emotions that have been carefully built up and that leads the final act into a rote shoot-out-and-chase action finale. All the stuff before that – the way Jon outthinks everyone else in the movie, the way Ahmed plays the role so close to his chest – is much more interesting.
“Relay” is the rare film that maintains suspense so expertly you’re sad to see it resolved. All movies come to an end, of course. Too bad this one throws in the towel.
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R. At area theaters. Contains strong language. 112 minutes.
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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.