Academy Award winner Riz Ahmed to lead tense-drama Relay, set to release in India on Aug 22

Relay is a tense New York thriller which is very much of the now but has echoes of the great soulful paranoid thrillers of the 70's.

Relay, an upcoming timely thriller, presented by PVR INOX, will be hitting Indian theaters on August 22, 2025. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker David Mackenzie, the film starring Academy Award winner Riz Ahmed alongside Lily James and Sam Worthington.

After it premiered as a Special Presentation at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, Relay delivers a tense, high-stakes political drama that resonates deeply in today's world of surveillance, secrecy, and censorship.

In Relay, Riz Ahmed stars as a top-tier "fixer" who negotiates high-stakes deals between corrupt companies and their blackmailers. He stays anonymous by sticking to strict rules until a desperate client (Lily James) asks for his help to survive, forcing him to break his own protocol.

The director of the film David Mackenzie said about the film that, “Relay is a tense New York thriller which is very much of the now but has echoes of the great soulful paranoid thrillers of the 70's. It's a film about an outsider trying to do the right thing, it's about loneliness and the raw unsung bravery of whistleblowers who have to stand up to the powerful and dangerous forces trying to prevent them from speaking out. In our case it is entirely fictional but I hope it speaks to broader truths in a world where the control of information and 'the narrative' is one of the key societal battlegrounds of our times. It’s a story about the vulnerability of someone with no safety net, fighting a system rigged self-protectively against anything that opposes it.”

The film portrays Riz Ahmed as a burdened man haunted by his past, while Lily James plays Sarah, a woman whose moral courage pits her against powerful foes. Sam Worthington delivers a chilling performance as a ruthless corporate antagonist.

Relay is a gripping thriller that explores secrecy, survival, and the heavy price of doing the right thing, full of sharp tension and haunting depth.