Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Tale of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model aiming for a move to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he manages to extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in bursts of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and stingy with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.
Acting and Cinematic Craft
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between innkeeper and guest, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Obsessing over emptiness, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
The film is available on Mubi from November 7.