Riz Ahmed is carving out a niche in the action-thriller space. After leading “The Night Of” series, the Oscar-nominated actor (he won for his short film “The Long Goodbye”) is expanding his action chops with David Mackenzie‘s “Relay.” The critical darling film debuted at TIFF 2024 and was later acquired by Bleecker Street.
Ahmed stars as a world class “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and individuals threatening to expose them. 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.
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“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.
“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.”
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.
Black Bear financed “Relay” and produced alongside Thunder Road Pictures and Sigma Films. 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.
The IndieWire review credited “Relay” as an “old-fashioned movie about an old-fashioned guy. The movie is 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.”
Bleecker Street will premiere “Relay” in theaters August 22, with a PVOD release of September 16. Check out the teaser below.
