By George Bate
The “curry western” emerged in the 1970s when Bollywood filmmakers like Ramesh Sippy drew inspiration from American and Italian spaghetti westerns to couple tropes like sun-baked badlands, Ennio Morricone-style scores, and brooding anti-heroes with traditional Indian dacoit cinema. With his new film making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), director Samjad reinvents the curry western by integrating brutal martial arts combat and a duo of half-blood vampires, resulting in a gory revenge fantasy unflinching in the brutality of its violence and depravity of its antagonists.
Half follows twin siblings Ethan (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj), vampires who have supernatural abilities and strength. While traveling across the desolate Rajasthan desert, Ethan and Ivy are ambushed and left for dead by a group of violent marauders. Upon recovering from their wounds using their vampire healing abilities, the siblings embark on a crusade against the raiders who wronged them.
After a deceptively light-hearted prologue involving a bickering Ethan and Ivy as children, Half very quickly takes on a barbarity even the most steadfast of viewers may be disturbed by. The bandits whose violence spurs the twin vampires into action fail to exhibit a shred of empathy or humanity as they brutalize an innocent family, murdering them one-by-one and stripping them of everything they own. It’s an admittedly savage beginning, although one that effectively introduces a band of vicious villains to root against.
When Ethan and Ivy fall victim to the bandits’ cruelty, the gang of despicable criminals fail to realize that they have just crossed paths with vampires in possession of extraordinary strength and supernatural healing abilities. Disappointingly, the film appears uninterested in even slightly exploring the lore or mythology underlying the vampires and conceptualizes them more as superheroes who can heal when not in direct sunlight, as opposed to the blood-craving nightdwellers depicted in most other vampire stories. Without on-screen text at the beginning of the film and some elongated canine teeth that occasionally evidence themselves in the mouths of the protagonists, one could easily not characterize Half as a vampire movie.
Having vampires as the lead characters allows director and co-writer Samjad to pit two virtually invulnerable characters against an array of bad guys in a number of action set-pieces. Renowned choreographer Very Tri Yulisman, known for his work on The Raid 2 and The Night Comes for Us, oversees the number of impressively engineered combat sequences in the film. Interestingly, while extensive time and effort clearly went into choreographing and framing the action, it is the gore punctuating the violence, rather than the actual combat itself, that makes Half stand out amongst other martial arts movies.
Backed by Ivy’s energetic playlist of songs, the violence in Half becomes a character unto itself, such is its prominence in the film and visceral effect on the audience. Limbs are torn off, kids are killed, and faces are burned to a crisp in boiling stew in a movie that does not shy away from positioning gory, grisly imagery front-and-center. While the action is handled solidly, albeit not at the level of The Raid 2, the film seems more destined to achieve cult genre status due to the extreme violence that punctuates key moments of the action set-pieces. Samjad masterminds a film that almost certainly will make audiences wince, avert their gaze, and laugh as a means to relieve tension.
Drawing inspiration from From Dusk Til Dawn, Near Dark, John Wick, and The Raid 2, Half oscillates through the curry western, vampire thriller, and action genres with ease throughout the duration of its sub-90-minute runtime. But, unlike its influences, Samjad’s film falters with the lack of personality it affords its protagonists. Ethan and Ivy hardly utter a line of dialogue in the film and, other than looking pretty badass as they kill countless enemies, do little to distinguish themselves as compelling heroes to get behind. As attempts to flesh out Ethan and Ivy with fleeting flashbacks to their mother underwhelm, the audience is far more likely to be invested in the conflict because of the despicability of the villains’ behavior, rather than their care for the twins’ pursuit of revenge.
VERDICT: 6/10
Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Half reinvents the curry western with an ample dose of brutal action and a duo of formidable vampires. After lulling the audience into a false sense of security in its first few moments, director and co-writer Samjad proves unflinching in the brutality of violence and depravity of antagonists he is willing to put to screen. Solid action choreographed by Very Tri Yulisman, known for his work on The Raid 2 and The Night Comes for Us, packs a decent punch, but it is the extreme, shocking violence punctuating action set-pieces that gives Half an identity of its own and renders it a wince-inducing, gaze-averting crowd-pleaser. Protagonists lacking in personality and underdevelopment of their vampiric origins mean Samjad’s film operates more successfully as a neo-Western and action movie than it does a vampire thriller, although the contrast between the despicability of its vicious antagonists and the justice so brutally exacted onto them by the two vampires imbues Half with Inglorious Basterds levels of revenge fantasy catharsis.