A modern anti-tech thriller, "Relay" triumphantly champions the forms of communication we've largely left behind or pushed to the margins, while showing that themes of paranoia and corporate malfeasance are universal, no matter the mode of delivery. It's a '70s-style, street-smart, feet-on-the-ground action movie, right up until the moment it betrays itself, and its audience.

Riz Ahmed, Oscar-nominated for his role as a deaf drummer in "Sound of Metal," plays Tom, a shadowy fixer who helps protect whistleblowers from the corporations they're exposing. His methods of staying anonymous in a digital world include burner phones, the U.S. Postal Service and, most thrillingly, a phone system for the deaf and hard of hearing, which relays calls from a keyboard through an intermediary third party. As a dramatic device, it's startlingly effective.

Tom exists in the margins, blending into backgrounds with ease through a series of simple wardrobe swaps. He's the security guard you don't notice, the police officer coming off the subway, the bearded bike messenger riding by. Ahmed's Tom is so good at disappearing that he threatens not to exist, which is just the way he wants it.

Director David Mackenzie ("Hell or High Water") does a crackerjack job of showing us Tom's world, a New York where he's everywhere and nowhere all at once. Tom's main assignment is helping out Sarah Grant (Lily James), who has the goods on her former employer's wrongdoings involving toxic chemicals being spread through a fertilizer. Fearing for her safety, she hires Tom to broker a deal between her and her ex-employer, and to handle the particulars of her ensuing payday.

A team of corporate goons, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington), would just as soon silence Sarah. It's Tom's job to make sure that doesn't happen, and he fends them off while staying hidden in the shadows. "Relay" largely plays out like a game of cat and mouse where the mouse is barely detectable.

It's too bad, then, that the script by Justin Piasecki turns clumsy, asking us to believe that Tom would drop his guard for a client — which goes against everything we're told about him and his methods — and then hits audiences with a twist that defies logic, let alone everything we've seen up to that point in the movie. It takes away from the tightness of the world Mackenzie has created, and leaves viewers hanging on the line.

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'RELAY'

Grade: C+

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:52

How to watch: Now in theaters

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