Malayalam Vampire Thriller Half Lands at TIFF Midnight Madness With Worldwide Sales Deal

Half brings vampires, martial arts, and revenge to TIFF’s Midnight Madness after securing international sales.

Malayalam Vampire Thriller Half Heads to TIFF Midnight Madness With Best Friend Forever Handling International Sales

Indian genre cinema is getting another major international spotlight as the Malayalam-language vampire action-thriller Half prepares to make its world premiere in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival.

According to Deadline, Paris-based sales company Best Friend Forever has acquired international sales rights to the film ahead of its Toronto debut. The move gives Half an unusually early international push for a Malayalam-language genre title, with a European sales agent and TIFF Midnight Madness premiere secured before its home-market release.

Produced by Kerala-based Fragrant Nature Film Creations, Half is directed and co-written by Samjad alongside Praveen Viswanath. The pair previously collaborated on the 2024 Malayalam psychological mystery-thriller Golam.

The film stars Ranjith Sajeev, Aiswarya Raj, Abbas, Amala Paul, and Srikanth Muruli.

Half follows twin half-blood vampires, played by Sajeev and Raj, who find themselves at war with desert highway hijackers. The film combines vampire mythology, revenge thriller mechanics, martial arts action, and western imagery into a bloody genre hybrid built for the Midnight Madness crowd.

The action is a major part of the package. Very Tri Yulisman, whose credits include The Raid 2 and The Night Comes for Us, spent months training the cast to perform their own stunts. Yulisman also developed custom camera rigs designed to capture the fight sequences in-camera, while members of his stunt team recently worked on The Furious.

Best Friend Forever co-founders Martin Gondre and Charles Bin described Half as a combination of two established genre forms, blending the vampire film with the revenge thriller and emphasizing the film’s fight choreography and production scale.

The film is produced by Anne Sajeev and Sajeev P.K. for Fragrant Nature Film Creations, the banner behind Pranayam and Qalb.

For its Indian rollout, Excel Entertainment, in association with AA Films, will present and distribute Half across North India. The deal marks Excel Entertainment’s first collaboration with the Malayalam film industry.

Best Friend Forever arrives at TIFF with several titles across the festival and market, but Half stands out as one of the slate’s most aggressively genre-driven projects. A Malayalam-language vampire western with in-camera martial arts choreography already feels tailor-made for Midnight Madness, and its early international sales positioning suggests the film could travel well beyond the festival circuit.

Half will make its world premiere at TIFF Midnight Madness, with additional release details expected to follow.