The actor Riz Ahmed has an inviting, soft voice with a light rasp and a facility for making dialogue sound better than it is. “Relay,” a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness. He plays Ash, a New York broker of sorts who operates in an ethical gray zone helping little-guy clients get out of sticky jams with powerful interests. For the first hour or so, Ash speaks only a smattering of words, which concentrates your attention on the character’s disquieting watchfulness and on the slow-burning complications.
Those intricacies largely involve shady characters slinking around, spying on one another and at times making anxiety-inducing, potentially lethal moves. A lot of this is enjoyable partly because the story is basically a feature-length tease. To build suspense, the filmmakers — the scriptwriter is Justin Piasecki — parcel out information one clue, red herring and enigmatic action at a time as Ash goes about his curious, clandestine business. He spends a lot of time furtively slipping through the city or doing something interesting-looking in a fortified hideaway. He uses a mix of high- and low-tech, too, including a spy camera and a device that looks like a fax machine. (Kids: Please see Wikipedia for an explanation.)
The machine is a textphone, which can be used by those with hearing or speech issues: Caller and callee communicate via typed messages relayed aloud by an operator. This insures privacy and anonymity for Ash, who simply types his messages, allowing his voice to remain obscured from those on the other end. It’s a nifty narrative detail that the story also uses to emphasize his melancholically tinged isolation from other people. Ash lives in a semi-industrial lair (no dog, no cat, not even a plant, at least that I recall). He seems friendless and romantically unattached so when he secretly scopes out a jittery new female client, Sarah (a miscast Lily James), it is no surprise that he starts letting his professional defenses down.
Mackenzie and Ahmed make a good team, and they’re especially well-synced during the movie’s stronger first half. Mackenzie — whose credits include “Hell or High Water” (2016) — sets the unsettled scene with shadowy visuals and a clipped pace. He also showcases Ahmed’s expressive range, which here tends toward variations on coiled tension. Ash is often either watching other people or giving his neck a workout by scanning his surroundings, checking to see if anyone is watching him. He has good reason to be on alert when Sarah enters the picture: She tells Ash that she’s taken incriminating documents from her former employer, which she now wants to return. She says she wanted to do right, but things got hinky.
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