Two halves make a satisfying whole in this lean, mean action-horror, in which twin vampires stalk a scorching-hot Madras Max: Fury Road dystopia in the none-too-distant future. The 1996 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn springs immediately to mind, but, compared to that, director Samjad sinks his teeth into the meat of his movie in next to no time. Scored with an urgent techno-bhangra beat by Midhun Mukundan, the result is a violent revenge thriller that has been lapped up on the genre circuit since it premiered in the Midnight Madness strand at TIFF earlier this year.
The film starts with the minimum of backstory, which is at odds not only with the norms of Indian cinema but also the press book, which suggests that a whole lot of exposition about the genesis of the story’s two siblings has been cut. This might be for the better; our introduction to Ethan and Ivy (Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj) is brief but suitably ominous. “Born of mortal dust and vampire blood, the twins walk in darkness,” a title card tells us, before we’re shown a brief flashback to their seemingly idyllic childhood where the two fight like cat and dog (“Raising you two will be the end of me,” says their mother).
Cut to the present, where the two are taking a road trip to the much busier Mumbai district of Pai Nagar in shades that not only protect them from the sun but, conveniently, make them also look very, very cool. As they make their way, we cut to a family of four making the same trip across the desert, passing Babu’s Puncture Shop, whose owner makes a phone call. Soon the family is being tailed by a couple on a scooter, carrying what appears to be a baby and yelling, “Sir! Sir! Oil leak!” The father pulls over, and the car is immediately swarmed over by bandits, who brutally kill him — plus his wife and two kids — with no mercy.
The aftermath of the crime is cleaned up with ruthless efficiency, the gang hauling off the car, stripping it for parts and burning the bodies of the victims, a process that threatens to rinse and repeat when Ethan and Ivy follow almost immediately in the same slipway. The murder of the family is graphic enough, but what happens to Ethan and Ivy is far more perverse, especially when Ivy’s apparently dead body is defiled by one of the feral desert gang members. Samjad keeps the twins’ superpowers under wraps for an agonizingly long time, until the sun goes down and their bodies are able to regenerate.
The wait is worth it; when Ethan and Ivy finally take their revenge on this criminal outfit — one by one, piece by piece — it’s with a satisfying sense of bone-cracking justice, orchestrated like S. S. Rajamouli’s 2022 breakout hit RRR at 200mph. The genius of Samjad’s conceit, however, is that, for all their superhuman abilities, the twins are vulnerable — not only is sunlight their only weakness, Ivy is also deaf and non-verbal, which adds a real sense of threat towards the end, when things look very bleak indeed.
Part of this is down to Samjad’s fantastic sense of world-building; like Peter Weir’s 1974 black comedy The Cars That Ate Paris, Half is a sardonic comment on the sleazy eco-system of crime: Babu’s Puncture Shop is just one layer in a pyramid that goes surprisingly high and eclipses even the bumbling, paid-off police force, which wilfully sees no evil and nervously treats each investigation as “extra paperwork”. There’s also a twitchy paranoia at play, since Ethan and Ivy, as outsiders, inevitably spark a turf war as various warring factions try to figure out who is killing their men.
There aren’t too many directors that can sustain this level of inventive carnage — even Takashi Miike has yet to show a man choking to death on the stump of his own severed hand — but Samjad directs the action with clarity and skill, helped immeasurably by Very Tri Yulisman’s incredible fight choreography. A puzzling coda means the film ends later than it probably should, but Samjad has already established his impressive cult bona fides: If you only see one gory Malayalam neo-noir spaghetti western vampire beat-’em up in your life, make it this one.
Title: Half
Festival: Sitges, TIFF
Director: Samjad
Screenwriters: Praveen Viswanath, Samjad
Cast: Ranjith Sajeev, Aiswarya Raj, Amala Paul, Abbas, Sreekanth Murali
International sales: Best Friend Forever, Fragrant Nature Film Creations
Running time: 1 hr 36 mins