The tale of a young woman, a film director trying to get a fantastic horror movie made, who hears all about a film that was apparently haunted, Warning: Do Not Play is a film full of familiar moments, but very few of them are any good. It's arguably just as bad as something like Don't Look Up, but I've seen very few people be as critical of it.
Writer-director Kim Jin-won seems to think that he has a good enough idea here to make a cracking horror movie. Mi-Jung (Yea-ji) is the young woman who hears about the infamous horror movie, while interviewing a group of students about urban legend/horror stories they have heard about, a la Candyman. This takes her on a quest to seek out the movie, which has her eventually being contacted by the director, Kim Jae-hyun (Jin Seon-kyu). She is warned away from anything to do with the movie, it's a cursed and evil piece of work, but that just makes her more determined to find out more about it, and to view it with her own eyes. Which really doesn't seem like a smart plan.
This is a difficult film to talk about, mainly because it comes together to be much less than the sum of its parts. Individual elements are perfectly fine, from one or two of the main scares to the special effects, but the script is a bit too slippery, and full of bits that were done better in other movies, to allow viewers to appreciate how things are playing out. The fault must lie squarely at the feet of Jin-won, although he has at least gone for something very different from his debut feature, the strange and wild bit of extreme cinema titled The Butcher (2007).
Yea-ji and Seon-kyu both do decent work in their roles, but they can't quite manage to do enough to carry the whole film on their shoulders, as they must. Although there are also performances from Kim Bo-ra, Cha Yup, Ji Yoon-ho, and others, the film stays focused on the two main characters who can somehow see through the dark enchantment that emanates from the film and affects so many other people, both on and off the screen.
If you're new to the world of South Korean cinema then I recommend you check out a good twenty or thirty films ahead of this one, and many of those would also belong to the horror genre (let's be honest, there's no way anyone should see this before having seen a classic such as A Tale Of Two Sisters, for example). Making use of the sheer wealth of cinema available from everywhere around the globe, there's actually no need for you to ever get to this. I guess it is maybe ironic that I am ending this review with what basically amounts to a warning against pressing play on this. But that's what I'm doing.
3/10
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