By George & Josh Bate
Is there an actor working today as underappreciated as Riz Ahmed? From blockbusters like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to atmospheric HBO drama’s like The Night Of to his Academy Award-nominated turn in The Sound of Metal, Ahmed has silently developed a reputation as a reliable player in stories big and small, whose mere inclusion in a project warrants attention. Relay, Ahmed’s latest film, sees the actor deliver an understated performance in a gripping, tense thriller drawing from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and the Jason Bourne movies.
From Hell or High Water director David Mackenzie, Relay sees Ahmed star as Tom, a world-class fixer who serves as an intermediary between whistleblowers and corrupt corporations harboring dark secrets. When hired by his latest client Sarah Grant (Lily James) to broker a payoff with a large corporation, Tom takes on a greater challenge than he initially expected as he faces off against an intelligent adversary (Sam Worthington) and blurs the lines of professional boundaries when he grows to care for Sarah.
Relay operates as a dialogue-heavy, largely action-less thriller, in the vein of Coppola’s The Conversation. In a unique turn, most of the dialogue is presented through a telecommunications relay service, with an operator serving as an intermediary between Tom and other characters. For those unfamiliar, a telecommunications relay service (TRS) is a service provided for people who are hard of hearing or who have difficulty producing speech. TRS works by someone making a call to a relay service and then an operator at the relay service speaks aloud what the caller types to the recipient of the call. It’s a risky call to use this way to convey dialogue in such a dialogue-heavy film, but one that pays off immensely. The conversations between Ahmed and James’ characters using the service are electric. The stakes are high, the enemy is always surveilling, and Ahmed and James playing off of each other extremely well, a particularly extraordinary feat given they are using an intermediary to speak to one another. Like the story, the interactions between the characters are layered with subtext and unease. The dialogue doesn’t weigh down the audience; rather, viewers are pulled deeper into the tension-filled world the characters are living in through dialogue alone.
The relay service employed by Ahmed’s character speaks to the film’s fascinating focus on privacy, surveillance, and anonymity. Like the Bourne franchise, Relay intrigues as one of those movies that sheds light on the innerworkings of surveillance technology, corporate overreach, and just how fickle our privacy really is. The mere inclusion of the relay service, which was something unbeknownst to us prior to the film, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how Mackenzie’s film dabbles in spy movie territory and hooks with the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game between Tom/Sarah and a team led by Worthington’s character. But, like The Conversation, Relay is less focused on telling the glamorous side of spies and saboteurs, instead honing in on the psychological cost of a relentless back-and-forth in which both parties are armed with modern surveillance technology. The film has a slow start, but, once the central conflict is introduced, this back-and-forth cat-and-mouse game captivates to the very end.
Although we labeled Relay as ‘dialogue-heavy,’ this term is less an indication that the movie is wordy and more so suggestive of how much of the story’s excitement and drama unfolds through seemingly mundane dialogue sequences, rather than full-fledged action. In this dialogue-heavy (of sorts) thriller, Ahmed is actually surprisingly quiet for much of the film. Indeed, he doesn’t utter spoken dialogue for so much of the film that it would be easily to initially mistake him for being mute or having a speech disorder. The lack of spoken dialogue means much of Ahmed’s performance relies on facial expressions and body language, both of which the actor demonstrates a strong command of. Ahmed imbues his character Tom with a quiet intensity and unmistakable intelligence, ensuring that the audience quickly buys into him being an expert in espionage, privacy, and coded communication. When the drama ramps up in the final third, Ahmed is given more overt opportunities to flex his acting muscles and does so with resounding success. Every decision the character makes is understandable and even relatable given the nuance Ahmed brings to his performance.
Carefully distributed throughout the film’s relay-based dialogue scenes are a series of exhilarating sequences, most of which would not feel out of place in the best of Bourne movies. These segments are as close to full-fledged action as Relay gets, but they are far more gripping than most films dominated by punches thrown and shots fired. Through excellent performances from Ahmed, James, and Worthington, backed by confident directing from Mackenzie, who uses every inch of the frame so carefully and doesn’t waste a moment on a sluggish or pointless shot, Relay comes alive in these segments and becomes as much a thriller as it is an espionage film.
The trajectory of the thriller/espionage story takes a number of interesting directions throughout. At about the halfway mark, it seems as if the film’s conflict has resolved and the end could be near, but a wrench is suddenly thrown in the mix that leads to Ahmed’s character losing sight of his boundaries and nearly an hour of nail-biting tension. And, in typical spy movie fashion, this tension culminates in a big twist at the end that is as surprising as it is narratively effective, even if it raises a few questions regarding a certain character’s behavior and decisions throughout the film.
VERDICT: 7.5/10
Relay pulls from the Jason Bourne franchise and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation in telling a gripping story about privacy, surveillance, and corporate espionage. A risky decision to have most of the film’s dialogue come through a telecommunications relay system, which sees an intermediary impart information from a caller to a recipient, pays off immensely in playing perfectly into the film’s themes and adding a layer of intrigue to an already suspenseful film. Despite being a more dialogue-heavy thriller, star Riz Ahmed stays silent for much of the film, instead commanding the screen with a nuanced performance reliant on his quiet intensity and intricate attention to body language. Carefully scattered between the dialogue are some exhilirating chase / espionage sequences that would fit seamlessly in with the best of the Bourne movies. The nearly two hours of overt and much subtle tension culminates with a big twist that is as unpredictable as it is narratively effective, even if it raises some questions about a certain character’s behavior throughout the film. Relay is just the latest evidence that Riz Ahmed is an actor that demands more attention and praise than he receives. Alongside Hell or High Water director David Mackenize, the Academy Award-winning actor crafts a modern day cross-breed of Jason Bourne and The Conversation with dialogue as gripping and intense as its action.