HALF

Since its 1970s heyday, the “curry western” has been a popular genre style across the Indian film industry. Indebted to American and Italian varieties of the form, these epics remixed the iconography and style of filmmakers like John Ford and Sergio Leone with culturally specific ingredients to fit a rural Indian frontier beset by roving gangs of bandits known as dacoits. In Samjad’s HALF, the subgenre further mutates with the introduction of vampires, a hallowed horror archetype that has previously permeated neo-Westerns like From Dusk Till Dawn and Near Dark. In this context, it bears down on those aforementioned bandits with a righteous fury and insatiable thirst for vengeance.

Following a wintery prologue that establishes our vamps Rocky (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj), twin siblings whose interspecies parentage (human mother, revenant dad) grants them supernatural abilities and spares them from the usual inconveniences, we catch up with the pair as they are traversing the desolate roads of the Rajasthan desert. Suddenly ambushed by local marauders who brutalize their bodies with a viciousness that recalls Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs, brother and sister soon recover under cover of darkness and set out to maul, maim, and murder everyone responsible for the offense. 

With action skilfully choreographed by Very Tri Yulisman — who conducted the martial mayhem of The Raid 2, The Night Comes for Us, and Headshot — HALF is a rousing cavalcade of guts and gore, set to the eclectic Malayalam soundtrack of the nonverbal Ivy’s cellphone playlist and the percussive pummeling of Rocky’s fists.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: explicit violence, accident trauma, mature themes