Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Story of Family and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film follows guesthouse worker Sooha (Kim Bella) as she drives French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the demilitarised zone just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. After the francophone hostess is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model aiming for a relocation to the capital. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted 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 pursuit of inspiration, he manages to prise the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a vent – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or another figure entirely.
Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in flashes of secret, winding moments of physical constraint and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and stingy with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and visitor, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of modern ghost story.
The film can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.
