‘Devil’s Double Next Level’ movie review: Santhanam’s barely funny, least scary addition to an uneven franchise

Santhanam and Rajendran in a still from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit: Think Music India/YouTube

Let naysayers and non-believers say what they want, the Dhilluku Dhuddu films are the kind of guilty pleasure that must keep this world running. There’s a bungalow, a ghost or two, a foul-mouthed Santhanam, a Rajendran who leaves you in splits, and a basic storyline with a few twists that somehow keeps you invested. Of course, there are the usual problems, like the fresh-faced heroine used as eye-candy and Santhanam awkwardly still clinging onto his dreams of becoming a commercial cinema hero who can fight and dance. Devil’s Double Next Levela.k.a DD Next Level isn’t too different from the first three films of this franchise (while legal reasons might prevent them from officially calling it a franchise, every film has a meta line about being a sequel). However, the jokes don’t land where intended, and post-interval, the film ends up as a dreadful mess.

DD Next Level moves away from how each of its predecessors introduced the lead characters to the haunted bungalow. In Dhilluku Dhuddu, the heroine’s father, who is against her relationship, manipulates and takes the hero and his family to a bungalow to kill him off, unaware of the haunting presence there. In the second part, the heroine’s father was a black magician who sent a yatchi to protect his daughter from men lusting after her. The third was quirkier, revolving around a bag of money that many parties chase after, including the hero who needs it to save his relationship, only for the bag to end up in a haunted French villa.

A still from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

DD Next Level, surprisingly, doesn’t wait to introduce the horror element, taking off from a well-staged sequence featuring popular Tamil reviewer Prashanth. We are introduced to a mysterious ghost named Hitchcock Irudhayaraj (Selvaraghavan) who lures film critics to his mysterious theatre called Cinema Paradise (easter eggs abound, including a black magician named Mama Kurosawa) and kills them off because they are spoiling the sanctity of cinema. ‘Unga amma enga amma illa da, cinema!’ utters Irudhayaraj at one moment. But before you expect a serious take on film criticism, like R Balki’s Chup, I must remind you that this is a Santhanam film. And so director S Prem Anand swaps all that potential for some low-hanging fruits.

Our protagonist, a rather annoying one, is Kissa 47, an acclaimed film reviewer on YouTube. He behaves like a man-child emulating a Gen Z rapper and calls everyone ‘Bro’ in an accent that Santhanam struggles to maintain. One night, Kissa’s YouTuber girlfriend Aasai Harshini (Geethika Tiwary), mother (Kasthuri), father (Nizhalgal Ravi), and sister (Yashika Anand) are pulled into Irudhayaraj’s film, called Hitchcock Irudhayaraj. Kissa and his friend Veenpechu Babu (Rajendran) too enter the film’s world to save the former’s family, but to their shock, they find them playing quirky characters of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj, on a cruise ship with a masked killer, unaware of who they really are. His mother is a Telugu-speaking thief named Shilpa, his father is Captain McDonald, and his sister is Maya, a scantily-clad woman who is in love with…Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Detective Ragavan, the hero of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj.

After following these characters hilariously evading the masked killer, the film moves to an island mansion that is haunted by a ghost named Jessica, played by Kissa’s girlfriend Harshini. And that’s where all the chaos ensues in this slasher-cum-supernatural horror. Much of these initial portions work due to the many meta-references that organically find their way in. When they meet a Thai-speaking man who gives them a clue, Kissa and Babu can decode because subtitles appear on the screen. When Gautham romances Maya, the scene cuts to them dancing to ‘Uyirin Uyire’ from Kaakha Kaakha (props to Gautham for being a sport). Similarly, Kissa and Babu can hear voiceovers, play with slow-motion shots, and even travel to the past through flashbacks. Being a film reviewer, Kissa even asks a fellow character not to utter misogynistic dialogue.

A still from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Unfortunately, everything goes haywire for Devil’s Double Next Level in the second half, where the writer has clearly exhausted all the tricks in his arsenal, and we are left with a rather tedious one hour that spoils all the fun. At one instance, the makers repeat an idea from DD Returns that somehow just doesn’t work here. There’s also this testing scene surrounding Nizhalgal Ravi’s bowel movements that the film could have done without. What could have been a fun and taut comedy-horror gets stretched. A group of cannibals are introduced, serving no purpose other than letting Santhanam flex his muscles in some fight sequences.

The biggest letdown is the horror element at the centre; both Jessica and Irudhayaraj are easily the most boring ghosts in the franchise, and you certainly miss the gory kills and weapons-wielding ghosts of DD Returns. The scares decline, GVM’s character becomes as inanimate as a film prop, and the metaness of the film begins to wear thin.

At the end, the question that left me puzzled is how Kissa and Babu could see and interact with Irudhayaraj, who is sitting comfortably at his theatre, watching it all unfold on the screen. Is it because the makers couldn’t afford the cost of VFX for a portal that links the two worlds? But even a portal to another dimension couldn’t have saved the film from such writing or from besting Dhillukku Dhuddu 2 as the least entertaining entry to the franchise.

Devil’s Double Next Level is currently running in theatres