Relay Makes the Long Way Round Thrilling – A Review

This review contains no spoilers for Relay (2024).

Relay made me care deeply about the movements of a parcel. I have watched gunfights with less investment.

Riz Ahmed plays a fixer for employees who uncover corporate wrongdoing and immediately regret it. They have the documents, the frightened executives and the beginnings of a conscience, but no desire to become the next famous whistleblower. They want the opposite. Ahmed arranges the return of the evidence, negotiates payment and keeps everybody far enough apart to survive the exchange. When Sarah Grant approaches him after copying files from the agricultural technology company where she worked, he agrees to help her disappear back into ordinary life.

That is such a good place to begin a thriller. The decision has already happened and failed to make anybody feel brave. His clients know the truth, understand what exposing it could accomplish and still want out. Ahmed’s fixer protects them from the companies intimidating them while helping those companies recover the evidence they fear. He can settle the transaction. He cannot return anyone to the person they were before opening the wrong file.

Much of the communication passes through a telephone relay service designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Ahmed types, an operator reads his words aloud, the other person responds and the operator types everything back to him. It is slow, procedural and wonderfully awkward, forcing every threat to pass through the voice of a stranger who has no idea what it means.

The relay service has another much smaller virtue: it puts a few more actors on the call sheet. Each operator becomes a speaking role, complete with lines, a credit and, presumably, a slightly nicer pay packet. I approve wholeheartedly.

Now the title describes Ahmed as much as it does the service. He relays words, documents, money and fear while doing everything possible to remove himself from the exchange. Strangers provide his voice. Disguises replace his face. He has built a job around being present everywhere and known nowhere. At first that looks like tradecraft. Slowly, it also begins to look like loneliness.

Director David Mackenzie lets the film move at the speed of Ahmed’s work. He does not say a word for almost thirty minutes, yet there is always something happening in the way he watches, waits and prepares. Before the first hour was over, I checked the runtime convinced much more had passed. It had not, and I was delighted. Relay moves slowly without ever feeling still, finding tension in every delay instead of hurrying towards the next plot moment.

The postal manoeuvring is where Relay becomes properly clever. Piasecki finds dramatic possibilities in forwarding addresses and tracking numbers, then lets Ahmed work through them with the calm precision of somebody who understands the system inside out. The screenplay gives us only as much information as we need to follow the plan, never stopping to explain the machinery for its own sake. It is complicated without becoming confusing, practical without becoming dull and enormously satisfying to watch.

For a while, I thought Lily James was carrying the film by herself. Ahmed walks, watches and types while James has to supply the fear, urgency and human mess. She is excellent at making Sarah look as though she has not slept properly in weeks, holding herself together until a ringing phone or passing stranger knocks something loose. The film needs her panic because Ahmed refuses to offer any of his own.

Gradually, Ahmed’s apparent absence becomes the performance. His eyes are doing quite frankly ridiculous amounts of work. They check exits, catch reflections and study people without appearing to settle upon them. He changes pace, posture and clothing until he becomes another person moving through New York with somewhere unimportant to be. When he finally allows more of himself into the film, it feels significant because we have spent so long watching everything he refuses to reveal.

I loved the many disguises Ahmed wore. One of them carries enough Four Lions energy to make a tense sequence briefly ridiculous, and every new one makes the film a little more fun. More than anything, though, his performance feels like his Bond audition, much as Layer Cake became Daniel Craig’s. It is a shame Ahmed will probably never get the part. He would have been excellent.

Matthew Maher is one of those actors you recognise immediately but whose name you can never quite remember. He improves everything he is in, and his Hoffman is no exception. Among the people watching Sarah, Willa Fitzgerald makes surveillance feel like an active process rather than a matter of standing around and looking suspicious, while Sam Worthington does remarkably little early on and remains completely convincing as a man you would cross the street to avoid. There is not a bad performance anywhere.

Tony Doogan’s music is exactly present enough. It tightens around ringing phones, striking keys and arriving trains without dragging attention away from them. When the film becomes more physical, people remain affected by what has happened to their bodies. A hard impact is allowed to hurt. An injury changes how somebody moves. Nobody gets struck by something solid and recovers because the next scene needs them to run.

The action is well handled, although it is less distinctive than everything surrounding it. Plenty of thrillers can stage a pursuit. Very few could make me excited about postal regulations. Relay is at its best while finding secret routes through systems designed to be boring and watching intelligent people try to reach the same point from opposite directions.

For two hours, Relay had me hanging on every telephone call and following every movement of a parcel, thrilled by the waiting most films would have cut out.

That is a very good way to spend an evening.