How do two people speak freely when almost every word and movement can be tracked. You and I have probably wondered about this while doom scrolling or reading the latest leak. A new thriller called Relay imagines one answer. It borrows the basic shape of a real service that helps people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing or DeafBlind or who live with a speech disability place calls through an interpreter. In the film, a company with the same name steps into far murkier territory. It becomes a broker between people who have something dangerous to share and the powerful interests that need that information to stay buried. The system is organized and clinical. It is also fragile. The movie is about what happens when the plan cracks.
Riz Ahmed plays Ash, a solitary operator in New York City who spends most of his working hours inside a small apartment. He is quiet. Watchful. The kind of person who can sit perfectly still and still communicate a hundred thoughts with a glance. Ash is one of the faces and voices of Relay. He handles the messy parts of an otherwise invisible service. Lily James is Sarah Grant, an employee at a bioengineering firm that has discovered a way to alter a grain and market it as a lifeline to farmers in poorer regions. It is billed as a humanitarian breakthrough. There is a problem. The grain has toxic effects that did not appear in the sales brochure. Rather than halt the rollout, the company prepares to push ahead. A massive acquisition is about to close. The Securities and Exchange Commission filing is almost ready.
Sarah does what a lot of us would like to believe we would do. She tells her bosses. She tries to do it the right way. It goes badly. She is moved aside. Then watched. Then harassed. The film sets out her situation in an early scene with a lawyer who is meant to represent the old ideas about justice. She sits in an office and explains what she learned and what happened next. The lawyer listens and offers sympathy. Then the conversation veers. His firm does not want this fight anymore. He directs her to Relay. She wants a court case that shines light. The system has shifted to a private exchange of silence for money.
That is the cynical heart of the story. Relay offers a menu of protocols. The company sits in the middle and tries to keep the two sides from seeing each other clearly. Ash becomes the handler for Sarah. He receives a package of documents that could ruin careers and trigger criminal investigations. She moves into a temporary apartment and begins talking with him through the service. They build trust through distances and delays. That in itself is intriguing. A relationship conducted through layers of mediation. At the same time men hired by the corporation are combing the city trying to identify the courier and track the leak. The corporate fixers are not cartoon villains. They use modern tools. Cameras. Databases. Humans who pay attention. It is frightening because it is not impossible.
Inside Relay itself, the vibe is closer to air traffic control than espionage fantasy. People work in small pods while calls and feeds overlap on their screens. They speak in a clipped calm and direct their clients through a city filled with eyes. They remind everyone to follow the steps exactly. They nudge and redirect. The company takes fees from both sides. Early money flows to fund the handlers and the secure communications. Big money arrives only after the exchange is complete. The person with the documents signs a nondisclosure agreement, the acquiring company gets a sense of relief, and a secure copy of the evidence sits somewhere in case someone forgets to honor the deal. Relay promises to forward that copy to prosecutors and journalists if the terms are violated. It is a deterrent dressed up as insurance.
The film starts with a hum of control. When you watch the first hour, you feel the pull of a process story. A lot of the action takes place in rooms filled with screens and phones. It is oddly exciting. The craft is patient. The camera glides and holds. Calls overlap. Voices appear to pass through walls and across boroughs without crowding the dialogue. The mood is tense and strangely serene at once. Eventually the story is forced onto streets and rooftops and alleys. Vehicles start to move. People chase. There is a jolt in that transition. Some viewers will love the switch. Others might miss the quieter knife edge of the earlier stretch. I did. The most original part of the movie lives in the spaces that feel virtual and staged and fragile. The second half is by no means bad. It just steps into roads that are more familiar.
It is clear that writer Justin Piasecki and director David MacKenzie have had a long conversation with the paranoid thriller tradition. You can feel the DNA of classics where ordinary apartments become trapdoors and a city turns into a chess board. There are streaks of Three Days of the Condor and Klute in here, with their cool mood and moral confusion. There are echoes of newer stories that are more bounded by rooms and terminals, like the short lived and very good series Rubicon. Fans of Mr. Robot will recognize the rhythm of a quiet loner who toggles between keyboards and street craft. Hidden cameras. Tracking devices. Bad wigs and cheap glasses. Relay draws on all of that without turning into a parade of references. It wants to be in conversation with those works, not to mimic them.
Giles Nuttgens shoots the film with a wide canvas that never feels showy. The city has a majestic blur in the distance while faces stay precise in the foreground. The sound work is precise without being sterile. Cross talk from different rooms and devices floats through scenes without drowning the words you need to hear. Noise never becomes mush. Those choices give the whole piece a hum of credibility. You can imagine someone having gathered this knowledge over years of study and then trying to fold it into a story rather than dump it on your head as a lecture. It is research turned into motion rather than information turned into a diagram.
And yet, after the credits, you may find yourself doing the thing that can be dangerous to any thriller. You replay the choices and look for the seams. A few decisions nag. One coincidence in particular breaks the spell for a moment. Ash, who is portrayed as solitary and careful, turns out to have a tie to the only person who can bail him out at a critical moment. It feels like a card the filmmakers held in their sleeve for too long. There is also a thread about Ash and recovery from alcohol that seems like it exists less for the character than for the star. You can see how those scenes might humanize a figure who risks becoming a cold machine. You can also feel the calculation. Later events justify the inclusion. The arc still plays as the most conventional piece of an otherwise inventive puzzle.
The movie struggles with the question of how much to reveal about Ash. There is an art to leaving a character as a riddle and an art to taking us inside their head. Think of those early Clint Eastwood parts that held you at a distance and became magnetic precisely because of what they would not give. Then think of the other path, where the film lets you in and the person blossoms. Ash ends up in a middle space. Not fully unknown and not fully known. Ahmed is so skilled that, for a long stretch, he needs almost no language. He can carry a whole scene in the way he watches or the way he turns away. When the final explanations arrive, they hit with less force than they should. The reasons are exactly what you would have guessed. That is not a crime. It is simply less arresting than the mystery.
I do not want to minimize what Ahmed achieves here. He is quietly dazzling. His energy is banked but ready to flare, and when the flare comes it feels like something he has been fighting down. There is a single mindedness that reads as strength until it curdles. He can be obsessive without turning into a stereotype. He can believably snap into violence without losing the core of the character. Lily James brings a sort of ordinary bravery to Sarah. She is not drawn as a saint or a mastermind, which is a relief. She is someone who made a choice and is trying to live with it. Victor Garber shows up for a small role and reminds you why he is the one so many directors call when they need someone to quietly steal a scene. Sam Worthington plays the leader of the team following Ash and Sarah, and he gives the role a restrained menace that helps the movie. Matthew Maher appears as a former Relay client who got what he asked for and discovered that getting what you want is not the same as being all right.
If that cast had been dropped into a sloppier movie, they could have saved it. Here they help push a good film to the edge of being special. Relay is full of ideas about the moment we all inhabit. The way institutions ask people to accept settlements and secrecy instead of sunlight. The way the thrill of exposure has been replaced by weary calculation. There is a nerve throbbing under the story. How do you set up a climax in a world where calling the police or a major newspaper does not carry the old narrative charge. The decade we just lived flattened some of our old structures of belief. Heroes dumping boxes of evidence into the arms of a news anchor at a press conference used to feel like the finish line. Now it can feel like the opening move in a long and ugly stalemate. Powerful figures can ride out storms. They can retreat into denial and wait for the tide of outrage to ebb. Some of them do not even bother to retreat.
That is the other sharp question in this film. What do thrillers do now that cynicism is the baseline. Relay touches it. There is a moment when a villain tells the truth about how things work. He says things that are meant to bruise Ash and break his will. It works for a second. Then the story steps back from the precipice. I do not blame the filmmakers for refusing to march to an awful conclusion. This is not a horror movie. Still, once you say certain words out loud, it can be hard to pretend they are not there. The movie is torn between the desire to believe in the power of exposure and the knowledge that exposure alone can be absorbed and neutralized.
One way Relay tries to thread this needle is by focusing on process rather than rhetoric. It invests in the minutiae of a deal where silence is purchased and the seller is meant to receive some measure of safety in return. The detail work is terrific. Dead drops. Rigid instructions. The ritual of counting cash. The teams at Relay speak to their clients with the firm calm of pilots guiding a landing in heavy weather. There is an alluring fantasy in that control. A fantasy that there exists an organization capable of managing risk in a chaotic world. The film is honest enough to show the edges fray. A camera catches the wrong face. A tail is not spotted until it is too late. A person follows their heart for a second and the whole structure tilts.
The notion that the company keeps a safety copy of damning material and will send it to prosecutors or reporters if the other side cheats is the most chilling part of the premise. It implies that our systems are so broken that we need private intermediaries to enforce outcomes that used to be handled by the state or by public opinion. It is also a clever piece of dramatic engineering. The safety copy becomes a time bomb that can detonate if anyone plays games. The presence or absence of that copy drives choices in the back half of the film. It also raises a stern moral question. What is the price of that kind of order. Who decides when release is warranted and when it is not. The movie lets you sit in that discomfort without scolding you.
There are places where Relay loses its nerve. A late reveal that ties Ash to a surprise helper feels like a cheat. You can hear the screenwriters trying to solve a structural crisis and reaching for a shortcut. The addiction subplot offers honest moments, but you can sense the safer motive behind it. In a story where everyone is a little opaque, a recovery arc is an easy way to build empathy for a lead and to justify a later decision. The film is better when it trusts Ahmed to do that work with his face and his silences.
Even with these stumbles, the achievement is real. The first hour especially is a model of how to make people in rooms vivid. There are no frantic camera moves to manufacture pace. There is poise and control and then the sudden snap of danger. The later car chases and foot races are energetic. They do not feel like they come from a different film, but they lack the uncanny newness of the desk bound sections. The rarest thing in a thriller is a fresh sensation. Relay finds it early when it leans into the choreography of remote control. I wish it had stayed in that world a little longer.
It would be unfair not to credit Lily James for the steadiness she brings. Her Sarah is not a naïve idealist. She is tired and indignant and still determined to do something that costs her. She sells the weight of someone who has been followed and dismissed and who keeps going anyway. The supporting cast is full of faces who make small roles land. Garber spends a few minutes on screen and leaves a footprint. Worthington keeps his character from becoming a speechifying brute. He is cold and efficient, and when he finally opens his mouth to give voice to a dark idea about the culture, it does not feel like a monologue bolted onto an action scene. It feels like the natural thought of a man who has seen a lot of rot.
The filmmaking team deserves credit for how much homework they did without turning the movie into a term paper. The use of technology feels lived in. The technique is sober. You can believe in the procedures and still feel the pulse of the chase. Giles Nuttgens gives New York a calm grandeur, both familiar and refreshed. The sound design keeps you oriented even as it makes the world feel busy and layered. Those are tricky balances to keep.
There is a lot of talk right now about what thrillers should be in an age when faith in institutions is low. Relay enters that conversation not with speeches but with a scenario that forces it. If your choices are private deals that hush the truth or public exposures that are swallowed by the machine, where does courage live. The film suggests that there is still meaning in individual acts. That does not erase the broader despair hanging over the landscape. The filmmakers seem to know this. They push back against it. They are not quite ready to lay down their swords.
I walked out feeling admiration and frustration at once. Relay is smart and crafted and often gripping. It has texture. It has a new angle on a genre that too often tries to save itself by turning the volume up. Yet it also pulls a couple of punches and plants a couple of miracles where it promised rough realism. It is at odds with itself. That can sound like a devastating critique. In this case it is closer to a description of a work that is wrestling with the hard facts of the moment. The movie wants to give you the thrill of a plan coming together. It also wants to tell the truth about plans and what happens to them when they meet power.
Maybe that is why Riz Ahmed feels like the perfect center for it. He is an actor who can communicate hunger and doubt and rage without a line of dialogue. He can hold two ideas in his body at once. He anchors the film through its switches in mode and mood. Lily James meets him with an honesty that keeps Sarah human. The rest of the ensemble strengthens the frame. The result is a good movie that brushes greatness and then drifts away from it.
Even so, I recommend watching it. Relay looks you in the eye and says the quiet part out loud. It asks whether secrecy purchased for cash has replaced accountability. It asks what courage looks like when the last scene at the podium is no longer a satisfying ending. It makes you consider the design of our new world of communication and control. And then, because it is still a thriller, it lets you hold your breath while money changes hands and a courier in a baseball cap disappears into a crowd. That is not nothing. In this era, it might be exactly the kind of story we get. And for now, that is worth your time.
