‘Relay’ Trailer: Riz Ahmed Is an Anonymous Fixer in David Mackenzie’s Acclaimed Action-Thriller Indie

Lily James, Sam Worthington, and Willa Fitzgerald co-star.

Riz Ahmed is cleaning up corporate messes, one corrupt client at a time, for David Mackenzie‘s “Relay.” The film, which debuted at TIFF 2024 and was later acquired by Bleecker Street, stars “The Night Of” alum as an anonymous “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corporations and individuals threatening to expose them. However, after one client’s case proves to be even more layered than usual, things go sideways.

The official synopsis reads: “A nameless character, he keeps his identity a secret by using a message relay service called Relay, which is usually used by people with a hearing or speech disability to make and receive telephone calls via text. Yet when a message arrives from a potential client (Lily James) who needs his protection just to stay alive, Ahmed’s character abandons his own ironclad rules of communication.” Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Matthew Maher, Helen Eigenberg, Pun Bandhu, Eisa Davis, Purva Bedi, Aaron Roman Weiner, Reed Northrup, Sasha Sen, Brian O’Neill, and José Báez co-star.

IndieWire previously debuted the teaser here, which encouraged audiences to text the number to get a special message from Ahmed’s character.

“Hell or High Water” director Mackenzie helms the action-thriller, which was financed by Black Bear. The company also produced alongside Thunder Road Pictures and Sigma Films. Additional producers include Basil Iwanyk for Thunder Road, Gillian Berrie for Sigma, Teddy Schwarzman for Black Bear, and MacKenzie. The executive producers are Black Bear’s Michael Heimler and John Friedberg, and Thunder Road’s Erica Lee and Charlie Morrison.

“It was just the idea that this person is doing everything without any direct communication with other human beings, which sort of adds to the aloneness of it and the sort of weird sort of tension and paranoia,” Mackenzie told IndieWire of directing the feature, which was written by Justin Piasecki.

The IndieWire review deemed “Relay” a “modern paranoid thriller that harkens back to the genre’s ’70s heyday [with] Justin Piasecki’s knotted script absolutely delighting in the process of Ahmed’s character’s work. Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, ‘Relay’ isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment at a time when corporations would rather kill a single whistleblower than spare the lives of 1,000 customers, and it pulls that off with expert precision.”

Ahmed told IndieWire that “Relay” is a return to classic indies. “This isn’t a high-concept AI, internet kind of movie,” Ahmed said. “Definitely one of the most distinctive aspects about it is how the main characters communicate or don’t communicate. From an acting point of view, that was really exciting to me, that you’ve got a director like David who can just bring characters to life with so little and bring out these complex relationships. It felt like a lot of fun.”

Bleecker Street will premiere “Relay” in theaters August 22. Check out the trailer below.