Ivy slips on her headphones as a bar fight gathers force around her. For a moment, the violence seems to move at a tempo she has chosen. Samjad’s Half often finds its personality in such exchanges between sound and action: the soundtrack can make a blow feel like a punchline, then leave the bodily damage plain to see. For a character who does not speak, the playlist offers a way of occupying the scene on her own terms.
The film’s other musical register belongs to the Rajasthan desert. Western-style cues and heavy rock give its roads the scale of a frontier, while Midhun Mukundan’s score helps carry the fights from threat into extravagant retaliation. These sounds are doing as much genre work as the sunglasses and vampire fangs. Half is a Malayalam action film comfortable borrowing the western’s imagery and the speed of contemporary martial arts cinema, then playing both at a volume suited to its own bloody excess.
Twins Ethan (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj) are travelling across Rajasthan when a gang of marauders attacks them and leaves them for dead. Their attackers have already been shown murdering an innocent family, so the film makes no mystery of where our sympathies should lie. Darkness brings the twins’ grievously injured bodies back into fighting condition. They are half human and half vampire, and their pursuit of the gang turns the road into a sequence of increasingly violent encounters.
That simple design gives fight choreographer Very Tri Yulisman room to work. A bar brawl allows Ethan to batter his way through a crowd while Ivy brings her own rhythm to the mayhem. Elsewhere, car chases spill into hand-to-hand combat, and opponents armed with a bow or a sickle give the twins something different to solve. The camera follows movement across the fights, and the fast editing generally keeps the choreography readable. Prosthetics and sound make the consequences of each strike difficult to shrug off, even when the amount of punishment tips into comic-book exaggeration.
Rajasthan matters to the film as a place of long, exposed roads where the gang can prey on travellers and official protection offers little reassurance. Samjad uses that space for the familiar western movement from ambush to revenge.
The marauders’ first attack supplies an immediate appetite for their defeat, but its cruelty also narrows the story. Once every encounter is arranged around what these people deserve, the film has to find fresh dramatic possibilities within the fighting itself. The varied weapons, vehicles, and musical shifts help for a while; the repeated assurance that the twins will survive makes escalation harder to sustain.
Their vampire heritage creates that assurance. Ethan and Ivy can travel by day, possess formidable strength, and recover after dark from injuries that would kill anyone else. Their fangs and sunglasses make a striking silhouette, yet the film shows little interest in blood hunger or in how their mixed lineage has shaped their lives. An elaborate set of rules might have slowed this lean revenge story. Still, when a supernatural trait chiefly guarantees another round of combat, the siblings begin to feel less strange as people than useful as action heroes.
Flashbacks of the twins bickering under their mother’s care suggest a warmer relationship than their terse present-day exchanges can fully express. Sajeev and Raj communicate long familiarity in the way Ethan and Ivy fight together, and Raj gives Ivy a vivid physical presence without dialogue.
Yet the film grants her greater control over a song than over the shape of the revenge. Her suffering is depicted with particular graphic force, while Ethan receives the more sustained opportunity to drive the retaliation. The imbalance matters because the childhood scenes ask us to invest in two siblings protecting one another, not simply in two bodies capable of surviving anything.
Half arrives in theaters in October 2026. The Malayalam vampire action thriller follows the dark chronicles of two half-blooded vampires navigating a tense, supernatural world filled with high-octane danger.
Full Credits
Title: Half
Distributor: Fragrant Nature Film Creations
Release date: October 2026
Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes (130 minutes)
Director: Samjad
Writers: Samjad, Praveen Viswanath
Producers and Executive Producers: Anne Sajeev, Sajeev P.K.
Cast: Ranjith Sajeev, Aiswarya Raj, Amala Paul, Sudheesh Calicut, Boys Manikandan, Srikant Murali
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Pappinu
Composer: Midhun Mukundan
The Review
Half
Samjad’s Half turns the Rajasthan desert into a forceful revenge stage, with bruising choreography and music that gives the violence its rhythm. Its most expressive choice is Ivy’s playlist, which lets her claim a fight even when the story gives her too little control over its course. The twins’ survival powers keep the action moving, but thin characterization and increasingly certain outcomes limit its impact.
PROS
- Inventive, readable fight choreography
- Music shapes the action
- Striking use of the desert setting
CONS
- The twins remain thinly drawn
- Ivy has too little agency in the revenge
- - Repeated survival weakens the stakes
