In TIFF’s (Toronto International Film Festival) own words the Midnight Madness section invites the festival’s “most devoted and raucous audience”. The late-night screenings that start at 11.59 pm, that too in the allegedly haunted Royal Alexandra Theatre on Toronto’s King Street West, are sheer bliss for the devotees of horror-action-sci-fi-bizarre-wild-genre cinema. The closest comparison one can make in India is to the rapturous fan screenings of a new Rajinikanth film.
Only three Indian films have figured so far in this exalted section—Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota (2018), Nikhil Nagesh Bhatt’s Kill (2023) and the first ever Malayalam film this year, Samjad’s Half.
Starring Ranjith Sajeev, Aiswarya Raj and Amala Paul, the film is a high octane mix of a Western, actioner, road movie and a horror film. It also has the romantic star of the 90s, Abbas, in a dramatically different turn.
Ranjith and Aiswarya play twins, Ethan and Ivy, who are half human-half vampires out on a rampage in the desert. Their mission to wreak vengeance on a group of highway bandits is teeming with blood and gore and extreme violence and boasts of some fabulous action set pieces crafted and conducted by Very Tri Yulisman of The Raid 2 fame. The pulsating soundtrack by Midhun Mukundan adds to the intensity and propulsion of the film that was shot over 120 days in Jaisalmer Rajasthan, Kuttikkanam in Kerala and Almaty Kazakhstan.
Not just TIFF, the film has also been picked up by the world's top genre festivals like Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest and Sitges.
The New Indian Express spoke to Ranjith and Aiswarya at TIFF on the morning after the heady Midnight Madness screening.
Excerpts:
Midnight Madness screening at TIFF is a very unique event. How did it go for you?
Ranjith: It was amazing. This is our first TIFF and on top of that we had our film premiere in Midnight Madness where the audience is supposed to have the highest energy. It was just crazy. We expected a good reaction but they just blew us away. For the film that Half is, I feel that this is the perfect audience to premiere with. We couldn't have asked for a better audience.
Has anything like Half been attempted in Malayalam cinema before?
R: I think vampire films have been done before but a vampire film that has the aesthetic of a Western and is an action thriller, that's a first. Samjad always thinks of these unique ideas. We worked on a film called Golam that was released in 2024. That was our first collaboration. That's more of a police procedural/investigative thriller but even then there was a newness to the plot, something that people wouldn’t have seen before. There has been the same approach with Half. He wanted to tell a story that hadn't been told before, create a new experience for the audience. There are a lot of vampire films and series like Twilight, Vampire Diaries and recently in Malayalam cinema there has been Lokah. How do you then stand apart and bring your own individuality and flavour? That was the mindset with which we went into making Half.
What did it demand of you as an actor?
R: After Golam we had decided that our next project together should challenge me as an actor and make Samjad tread new territories as a director. I'm a huge action film fan, always wanted to do one. I was waiting for the right opportunity and Half presented itself. Of all the films I've done so far, it has been the most physically challenging. We did all the stunts ourselves. There were no stunt doubles, we didn't use any harness or ropes for the jumps. Samjad wanted this raw, visceral feel to the action. He wanted every punch to have weight, every reaction to have weight, every fall and jump to feel real. The fight sequences are so great because of Very Tri Yulisman and his team of fight choreographers. This was the first Indian film that they worked on. They’ve done Hollywood films and Indonesian films that raised the benchmark for action cinema. Having them on board was an honour. It has been my most exciting film so far.
How was it for you Aiswarya?
Aiswarya: This is my second feature film. I did Officer on Duty with Kunchacko Boban, a crime investigation thriller where I played the villain. From that to jumping to this was really huge for me. I've only watched these kinds of movies in Hollywood. It took me a lot of time to understand how this works and to get into it, especially the physical aspect of it. I had never done action before. Throwing punches might seem easy but to do them with the choreography, to follow the rhythm and to coordinate with everyone was the hardest part. You have to know when to duck, when to react, how to react, and make it look realistic. Samjad wanted it to be as though the viewers were watching it right in front of their eyes. It had to be raw, with no artificiality to it. You don't see much martial arts. It's more animalistic. It comes from pure rage. My character, Ivy, is a person who's not able to speak and communicate. I'm not verbal, I don't have any dialogues. Only way I could bring out that rage, that weight, that burden inside me was through action, through physicality.
Was the shoot tough?
R: We started shooting in Jaisalmer around April 2025 when Operation Sindoor broke out. We could literally see drones flying past our hotel rooms. Everyone had to evacuate and the team went back to Kochi. We had to reschedule and replan, looking at parallel locations to shoot in case Jaisalmer did not work out. But they just couldn't find that aesthetic. That dry atmosphere that makes you feel like you're watching a Western. Luckily for us things settled down in a couple of weeks and we could resume the shoot. We went the last week of May, started the shoot by the first week of June and were there till September. We did not shoot even a single scene at a studio. It added to our immersion into that world and those characters.
The location helped us a lot, but it did have its negative sides as well. The weather is unpredictable, the sandstorms are bad. They blow tents away, make a caravan shake. 99% of the film takes place in this barren land with just sand and some trees everywhere. If it rained and got wet, the continuity got affected. We had to wait for another two days for it to dry out. There were a lot of unpredictable things that we had to make do with but the team stayed strong throughout.
There’s also the quintessential Indian emotion, the mother figure, the sibling love…
R: At the end of the day, no matter how good your action choreography is, there should be an emotion driving the action. The sibling emotion is the heart of the story, the Ethan and Ivy relationship. The camaraderie and chemistry had to work for the film to work in turn. The audience had to stand with Ethan and Ivy, what they went through, their trauma. But emotion is not shoved into people's throats. It's just about organically letting the screenplay do its thing.
A: We are not trying to make things emotional in the conventional way. Our characters are not that expressive. It is said that twins have this natural bond whereby they don't have to talk to each other but can still understand each other. The non-verbal communication. You can just look at each other and know what the other person is thinking. We have that in the film. When Ethan is near, Ivy can sense it. There is a natural antenna
Did you expect so much blood and gore when shooting?
R: That's exactly why I signed up for this film.
A: It was there in the script in detail. We could see the film right in front of our eyes in every sentence. ‘Yes. Give me more’ was the attitude we had.
R: I knew when I read it that when it comes on screen, it's going to be even bigger. I knew from the get-go that this is going to be a really special film and I was on board the moment I heard it. It got even better when Aiswarya came on board because we just had a natural chemistry working with each other.
A: Sometimes we kind of looked alike (laughs).