Now streaming on ZEE5 Global in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, DD Next Level is a wild, genre-bending horror-comedy starring Santhanam, Selvaraghavan, Gautham Vasudev Menon, and Geethika Tiwary.
Directed by S. Prem Anand and co-produced by The ShowPeople and Niharika Entertainment, this delightfully chaotic film started streaming on June 13 and brings a supernatural twist to satire, slapstick, and cinema itself.
A film critic walks into a screening… and ends up inside the movie
That’s the gloriously strange premise of DD Next Level. When the razor-sharp Kissa (Santhanam) attends a mysterious private screening hosted by a washed-up director (Selvaraghavan), he gets sucked, literally, into the cursed movie itself. Trapped in a haunted film controlled by a magical diary, Kissa must now survive the chaos he usually critiques from the outside.
The plot swerves into new genres every 15 minutes
What starts on a ghost cruise quickly spirals into a jungle survival tale, then a whodunit, then straight into fantasy. His family forgets who he is, serial killers crash the party, and danger shapeshifts constantly. And yet somehow, it all stays weirdly coherent. You never know what’s next, and that’s the fun.
It’s fully in on the joke —and invites you to be, too
DD Next Level embraces its plot, larger-than-life characters, and genre-hopping energy with total confidence. It plays with familiar movie tropes in a way that feels clever and entertaining, inviting the audience to be in on the madness rather than just watch it unfold.
Gautham Vasudev Menon’s cameo is pure meta madness
Gautham Vasudev Menon shows up in one scene and completely owns it. Playing a caricatured tough cop with a nod to a certain Kamal Haasan classic, his performance is equal parts parody and punchline. It’s the kind of unexpected cameo that makes the whole theatre grin.
The ending? A literal race against the end credits
In one of the cleverest final acts in recent memory, the credits themselves become a countdown. Kissa must rescue his family and escape the film before the names finish rolling. The result is a wild stretch of traps, twists, and emotional payoffs all playing out in sync with the scrolling names.
