Riz Ahmed and Lily James Star in David Mackenzie’s Paranoid Thriller RELAY

In Relay, Riz Ahmed plays a world class “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative
payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten their ruin. He
keeps his identity a secret through meticulous planning and always follows an
exacting set of rules. But when a message arrives one day from a potential client (Lily
James) needing his protection just to stay alive, the rules quickly start to change.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
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 ’70s. 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.
Whistleblowers are not normal people – so it seems from our research – they feel a
sense of right and wrong that drives them into reckless situations that require
courage beyond most of our capacities. They seem to be driven by a moral anxiety,
and when they have done what they have done, they are rarely praised and
appreciated but often shunned and isolated.
Ash, our film’s lead character, is a former failed whistleblower who has picked up the
pieces of his own isolation to start a solitary crusade protecting other people who
find themselves sharing his fate. He does this with paranoid tenacity, lost and anxious
amongst the throb of NYC – a victim trying to fight for other victims, someone who
can no longer go along to get along, and who acutely feels the loneliness of those
powerful and confusing righteous instincts.
As one job finishes (Hoffman, a soured pharma exec. disgusted by what he has
witnessed, safely escapes on a train to a new life) a new job comes in for Ash. This
time in the form of Sarah, a panicked biotech scientist who has some scary
information on her ex-employers and is being harassed by shady corporate
henchmen. Sarah has lost the will to fight and just wants to return the evidence and
go back to her normal life.
Ash, exhausted and uneasy, susses out her profile and reluctantly, but instinctively,
takes the task on. Sarah has to accept the edgy weirdness of Ash’s methods of
remaining untraceable in a totally trackable, digital age. And once she does she must
play by his rules or he will walk away.
These two outsiders must work together (never meeting or hearing each other,
communicating through old but still functioning methods designed for the deaf) to
safely remove the threat and allow a small semblance of Sarah’s old life to return,
away from the city, somewhere where she can build a new life. Ash ruefully
acknowledges her desire for normality, even though that is no longer an option for
him – his own life having been obliterated by the consequences of his past actions
and decisions.
As Sarah’s enemies edge closer – prepared to stop at nothing to get what they need –
a cat and mouse survival game unfurls where no one can be trusted and everything
is at stake. This is a political thriller for our times where powerful corporate forces are
pitched against lonely individuals who start to feel the echoes in each others’
situations and form unspoken bonds. It’s a story about the vulnerability of someone
with no safety net, fighting a system rigged self protectively against anything that
opposes it.
I’ve always been drawn to outsider characters and Ash is quite an extreme version of
that. My aim was to try to make a sophisticated intelligent film that is tense,
entertaining and engaging.

Director: David Mackenzie
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Gillian Berrie, David Mackenzie, Teddy Schwarzman
Executive Producers: Michael Heimler, John Friedberg, Erica Lee, Charlie Morrison, Per Melita
Production Companies: Black Bear, Thunder Road Films, Sigma Films
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Victor
Garber and Matthew Maher