Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Story of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Frontier Town
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama centers on guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s first feature also resides in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between two cultures. Once the francophone hostess is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
If not enjoying spectacular-looking marine dishes cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a move to the capital. However this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s subterranean feelings erupt in flashes of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan stays a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with particulars of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit separate from the main story, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.
Acting and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an nearly aggressive Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Obsessing over emptiness, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from 7 November.