India — Very Tri Yulisman Trained “Half’s” Leads in Pencak Silat, Then Shot the Fights With No Slow Motion

• Very Tri Yulisman built the fights in the Malayalam film “Half” on pencak silat.
• He trained leads Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj for months so they could carry their own material.
• Director Samjad used no slow motion, so distance and contact had to be right in the take.

Posted: September 14, 2026

Samjad’s Half is the first Malayalam title to land a Midnight Madness slot at Toronto, and the action department behind it is the reason it belongs there. Fight choreographer Very Tri Yulisman — a performer and choreographer out of the The Raid 2 and The Night Comes for Us lineage — built the film’s combat on pencak silat and spent several months training leads Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj to carry their own material rather than cutting to doubles. Months of prep on a specific system, rather than a general fight-fitness block, is what makes that decision survivable: silat’s footwork and close-range entries are unforgiving of half-learned shapes, and a principal who only half-owns the vocabulary is a performer the department has to cut around.

The choice that actually sets the choreography’s terms is Samjad’s decision to use no slow motion anywhere in the picture, capturing the action in real time on custom in-camera rigs built for the film. Removing speed ramping removes the most common repair tool in modern screen fighting — the beat that does not quite read at speed can normally be slowed until it does. Without it, distance, contact and recovery have to be correct in the take, and the rig has to travel with the exchange rather than waiting for it, which pushes the load back onto rehearsal and onto the performers’ ability to reproduce a beat identically across coverage.

Yulisman’s stated reason for silat over a more generic screen-combat vocabulary is a design argument rather than a stylistic one: the system’s idea of rasa — reading an opponent through micro-movement rather than reacting to a strike — maps onto characters whose perception is meant to be superhuman, so the heightened ability reads as choreography instead of as an effect. That is the useful version of “grounded” action on a genre picture, where the fights are asked to carry the premise rather than pause it.

Excel Entertainment came aboard the Malayalam vampire thriller, with Best Friend Forever handling worldwide sales. The film premiered in TIFF’s Midnight Madness programme.

Source: Tech Times — Half Earns First Malayalam Spot in TIFF Midnight Madness With Pencak Silat Vampires · Deadline — Best Friend Forever Boards TIFF Midnight Madness Indian Title ‘Half’

Learn more on IMDb: Half (2026) · Very Tri Yulisman