Half Review: India’s Vampire Western Is Bloody, Brutal & Frustratingly Underdeveloped [TIFF]

Half blends vampires, martial arts, gore, and the Indian desert into a wild revenge thriller, but thin characters and weak mythology hold it back.

Published Sep 18, 2026, 9:52 AM EDT

Josh is a film critic and journalist with over nine years of experience in the entertainment industry. Entering the field at just 17 years old, Josh went on to make his own website, The HoloFiles, and social media brand Star Wars Holocron, the most followed Star Wars fan account on Twitter/X.

A member of both the Chicago Indie Critics and the Hollywood Critics Alliance, Josh has covered major industry events including Star Wars Celebration and, most recently, CinemaCon for ScreenRant. His work has appeared in outlets such as Game Rant and Comic Book Resources (CBR), and he has been featured in publications including the BBC and The New York Times.

Imagine From Dusk Til Dawn or Near Dark transported from the American Southwest to the scorching deserts of India, where a duo of superpowered vampire siblings embark on a revenge mission against a gang of merciless marauders. That is roughly the pulpy genre cocktail director and co-writer Samjad serves up with HALF, a violent fusion of vampire horror, martial arts mayhem, and the curry western. Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Half has all the ingredients of a wonderfully unhinged midnight movie, but its thin characters and disappointingly underdeveloped vampire mythology keep it from becoming the deliriously entertaining genre mash-up it occasionally suggests it will be.

Half follows twins Ethan (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj), two half-blood vampires traveling through the desert to drop Ivy off for her new job. Their journey takes a brutal turn when a group of marauders attack and brutalize the pair, leaving them for dead. Unfortunately for their attackers, Ethan and Ivy are well capable of recovering from devastating injuries. Once they have healed using the power of the sun, the siblings set out to find the people responsible, and leave a bloody trail behind them.

Half Wastes Little Time Showing Its Brutal Side

Half reveals its savagery early, upon the introduction of its threatening antagonists. The horrifying raiders unleash hell on an innocent family, murdering its members one after another and taking everything they can from them. It is an exceptionally nasty way of meeting the film's villains, but it serves an important purpose: Samjad makes these criminals so thoroughly vile that one can’t wait to see them face justice.

From there, he doesn’t pump the brakes on the brutality. Fight choreographer Very Tri Yulisman (The Raid 2) and a team of impressive makeup artists lend their hand to a number of gory, grisly fight sequences in which Ethan and Ivy don’t come anywhere close to pulling their punches (or bites). The fights aren’t anything groundbreaking, given the sophistication of action in movies nowadays, but there is a pulpy style to the heightened violence that represents one of the few merits of Half.

Half's Vampires Are Its Biggest Missed Opportunity

There is a certain irony to making two vampires the central characters and then giving the audience remarkably little reason to care about what it means for them to be vampires. Their supernatural abilities allow them to survive injuries that would kill ordinary humans, and they possess considerable physical strength, but the film largely leaves the mythology surrounding them unexplored.

Aside from occasional glimpses of their elongated canine teeth, there is surprisingly little about Ethan and Ivy that makes them feel like traditional vampires. They do not appear particularly interested in blood, and the film does not spend much time establishing where their powers come from or what limitations they have. Their ability to heal outside direct sunlight is useful for the action, but their vampirism often feels more like a convenient superpower than a meaningful part of their identities.

That is particularly disappointing, because the premise has considerable potential. Taking the mythology of other vampire neo-Westerns and transplanting it into the Indian desert could have resulted in something genuinely distinctive. Instead, Half uses its vampires primarily as near-invulnerable action heroes.

Half Has A Main Character Problem

The biggest casualty of Half’s poor writing is the central relationship between Ethan and Ivy. The siblings spend much of the movie communicating through brief exchanges, or simply moving from one violent encounter to another. Their chemistry is razor-thin, and their personalities are frustratingly vague. Flashbacks to their childhood and relationship with their mother do disappointingly little to deepen their characters.

Half is at its best when it embraces its grindhouse, exploitation-movie instincts, and at its worst when it attempts to become something more substantial.

As a result, the revenge story lacks some of the emotional weight it needs. It is easy to hate the villains because of the atrocities they commit, but it is considerably harder to become invested in Ethan and Ivy's personal journey. The audience is largely cheering for the bad guys to get what they deserve rather than hoping the heroes achieve their goal.

That distinction matters. Half is at its best when it embraces its grindhouse, exploitation-movie instincts, and at its worst when it attempts to become something more substantial. The gore works, as does the desert setting, revenge premise, and even the fusion of Indian cinema and vampire Western. What does not work nearly as well is the attempt to turn Ethan and Ivy into fully realized protagonists without giving them enough dialogue, history, or personality to support that pursuit.

All that said, there is enough here to imagine Half developing a devoted cult following in the coming years. Its combination of martial arts, vampires, Western imagery, and outrageous gore is unusual enough to distinguish it from more conventional genre fare.

Half premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.