Review: ‘Warning: Do Not Play’ twists genres and expectations -

Found footage draws ire among some ⏤ but there’s something bewitching about witnessing a murderous rampage directly through the eyes of the victims. A sub-genre made famous with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project emerges as the underpinning of Kim Jin-won’s WARNING: DO NOT PLAY, a stylish and enthralling tale about one young filmmaker’s hunt for her next breakout screenplay. Even in borrowing particular genre tropes (don’t worry, only the film-within-a-film is found footage by definition), Jin-won relies on his own story’s strengths to unseat your expectations and crawl under your skin.

Creatively tortured, putting herself through various nightmarish hypotheticals, Mi-Jung (Seo Ye-ji) struggles to find inspiration, so she turns to a close friend and colleague to pick his brain for ideas. He recounts a spooky urban legend of a student film so terrifying the moviegoers fled the film’s premiere, and even one person had a heart attack ⏤ perhaps referencing such real-life terrors as The Exorcist, known to evoke such extreme responses in its audience. Mi-Jung scavenges various online sources, combing her way from one rumor to the next, until she tracks down the university at which the film was made.

Anyone she encounters are struck with blood-curdling fear and urge her to stop while she’s ahead. Of course, her curiosity gets the better of her, and she continues on her downward spiral to uncover the truth about this unspoken film. She then cobbles together several more puzzle pieces and posts online inquiring if anyone has any leads or other information. The now psychologically-ravaged filmmaker himself, Jae-Hyun (Jin Sun-kyu), reaches out via anonymous call, and he’s willing to meet, if only to deter her once and for all from her naive and misguided pursuits. In his desperate pleas to warn her of what’s to come, he only comes across as deranged, further spiking Mi-Jung’s determination to find the haunted footage.

Her search eventually takes her to the film’s location, a derelict theatre which possesses a horrific, bloody past. She is soon caught in the same ill-fated web those before her suffered, but her art longs for it, no, requires such laser-focus sacrifice. WARNING: DO NOT PLAY toys with perceptions, often flickering between erratic, grainy footage and the slicker compositions, courtesy of Jin-won and director of photography, Young-soo Yoon, who play with vibrant reds and cool, minty blues that seem to pierce right through the screen. Frame by frame, they lure you into Mi-Jung’s story, one that doesn’t exactly have such a happy ending.

WARNING: DO NOT PLAY ⏤ landing on Shudder this week ⏤ is an essential piece of South Korean horror.