The trailer has arrived for Relay, the upcoming thriller from Hell or High Water director David Mackenzie, offering what looks like a tense and twisty tale of espionage and ethics. Watch the trailer above and read on for the info.
Riz Ahmed leads the film as Tom, a calculating “fixer” who specialises in brokering covert deals between whistleblowers and the powerful corporations they threaten to expose. But when his latest client — Sarah (Lily James) — is marked for death and in desperate need of protection, Tom’s carefully managed anonymity begins to crumble.
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The film reunites Mackenzie, whose credits also include Outlaw/King, Starred Up, and the underrated Perfect Sense, with the kind of morally grey material that earned Hell or High Water an Oscar nod. Written by Justin Piasecki (from a long-gestating Black List script), Relay has Mackenzie tapping into old-school paranoia with a modern twist. “It’s sort of that weird way of circumventing surveillance, which I think is just fascinating,” Mackenzie told IndieWire. “Old technology also sort of harks back to those cool ’70s thrillers that kind of feel in the DNA of this project and hopefully echoes in it a little bit.”
Relay premiered at TIFF 2024 to mostly positive reviews and currently holds an 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It also recently screened at Tribeca 2025.
The trailer highlights Ahmed’s near-wordless performance, a restrained turn that mirrors the film’s quiet tension. “This isn’t a high-concept AI, internet kind of movie,” Ahmed told IndieWire. “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.”
For much of the first act, Ahmed’s character remains silent and unnamed. It’s only as the layers peel back that audiences begin to understand who he really is — a journey the film invites viewers to take with careful pacing and quiet revelations. “It’s important that when it all comes together, you really understand who he is, what his background is, and how that kind of forms a part of the puzzle,” Ahmed added.
Sam Worthington, Victor Garber, Jared Abrahamson, Willa Fitzgerald, and Matthew Maher round out the cast. Cinematography is by Giles Nuttgens (Hell or High Water, Enola Holmes).
Relay opens in U.S. cinemas on August 22 via Bleecker Street. No Australian release date has been confirmed yet.
