By M. Faust
(Image above: Riz Ahmed as Ash)

For as long as I have been writing about movies, late August has been the time of year when Hollywood, knowing that theater attendance will be at a low point, releases the movies they expect to make no money. (If it weren’t for contractual obligations, they’d probably be happy to dump most of these into the gaping maw of streaming services.)

When this practice started, the stuff that opened in theaters in the two weeks before Labor Day was generally abysmal. But the fact that studio bean counters don’t expect a movie to make money doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad: these days, it can also mean that the suits are unwilling to do the work it takes to persuade an audience to take a chance on a good film that doesn’t have some salient selling point. One of the appeals of the comic book movies and endless sequels that Hollywood is so focused on these days is that they don’t have to work to get audiences to see them.

When I went to see a 7 p.m. show of Relay on Friday night, I was the only person in the theater. Which is a shame, because it’s probably the best new film I’ve seen all year.

The film stars Riz Ahmed, a first-rate actor but not quite a box office draw despite appearances in the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, as Ash, which may or may not be the character’s real name. Operating in some of the seamier areas of New York City, he is an independent contractor with a career of his own devising. That one of his clients refers to him as “parasitic scum” speaks well of him given that (as is so often the case these days) the term is a far better description of the person hurling it.

Ash functions as an intermediary between whistleblowers and the corporations whose misdeeds they threaten to expose. More specifically, he helps whistleblowers who have come to regret their actions after they discover just how badly their lives can be damaged and how little protection there is for them. They just want to give back the information they took in return for a guarantee that they will be left alone in the future and some cash to start a new life.

How Ash is able to facilitate this while keeping his own identity secret in an era where personal privacy no longer seems to exist is the real engine of this cleverly conceived thriller. He has identified areas of information systems that, at least so far, let him communicate with parties without revealing anything about himself, and watching him at work is fascinating. It’s a testament to both the filmmakers and the actor that Ahmed compels our attention despite not having any dialogue for the first half of the film.

Ash’s carefully constructed operation is threatened when he takes on a new client, Sarah (Lily James), a medical researcher who has information that can tank a corporate merger worth billions. Though she just wants to escape the danger she has put herself in, she is pursued by a team of operatives (led by a suitably scary Sam Worthington) who are very determined to find both her and Ash.

Of the plot I will say no more, other than that the script is devised to have no fat, which is to say that everything that happens feeds into the film’s climax. This includes things that may seem like flaws or poor writing, so if you’re a nit-picker like me try to restrain yourself: all is eventually made clear.

Relay was directed by David Mackenzie, a Scot who has had a steady career making minor films since his internationally acclaimed Young Adam in 2003. His best known American movie is probably Hell or High Water (2016), a thriller about Texas bank robbers starring Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine that was also a late-August release. On the basis of those three films and what I have read about the rest of his sparse output, I want to start checking out more of his work: he seems to be undeservedly under the radar.

Relay is likely to be gone from local theaters by the end of this week. If you’re a mid-week moviegoer, I highly recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.