This film’s ending makes no sense – but it isn’t a complete write-off

RELAY ★★★½
(M) 112 minutes

Scottish director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) remains underrated, partly because he avoids making the same film twice. Still, there are recurring traits. One is a preference for cool colours: Relay, set in New York, is designed largely in shades of sea-blue, evoking both a pervasive loneliness and a sense that emotion of any sort needs to be submerged.

Nothing is obtrusively stylised: it’s just a matter of taking care with the look of an outfit or a computer monitor or a knick-knack on a windowsill, ensuring that everything fits the tone of romantic melancholy.

Relay is billed as a thriller, but it works best as a study of isolation: the main characters are kept apart for most of the running time, but seemingly have no one to turn to for support apart from each other.

True, the hero Ash (Riz Ahmed), who goes by several other names, is a regular presence at AA meetings, one of the more cliched devices in Justin Piasecki’s script. But he’s reluctant to talk about himself even to sympathetic listeners – and anyway, he doesn’t have the freedom to discuss his current job, which by its nature has to remain under the radar, like the assassination trade in John Wick – but a lot less glamorous.

His employers are the Tri-State Relay Service, outwardly a perfectly innocent way for deaf people to make phone calls but also a means to convey clandestine messages while remaining anonymous, at a very high price. Acting as a middleman between the interested parties, Ash types messages into an ancient-looking gadget, which an operator elsewhere passes on verbally (it’s less complicated than it sounds).

Sarah (Lily James), the latest client of the service, is a biotech scientist in possession of evidence of serious unethical conduct on the part of her former employers. Having been subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation, she declares herself willing to cut her losses, hand back the documents and get on with her life.

But to do this safely, she needs Ash, whose abilities extend to helping her evade the team that has her under surveillance (led by Sam Worthington, more effective as a gruff villain than he tends to be in hero mode). Before long, he too is following her at a distance, adopting various disguises and using some neat ruses to throw her adversaries off the trail.