🔗 Share this article

Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between dual heritages. Once the French-speaking employee is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she lingers uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Disruption

If not enjoying spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. However this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. Initially matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he manages to prise 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 proxy father, or something else.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions surface in flashes of clandestine, winding moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and control, with Sooha’s parent and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.

Performances and Directorial Approach

The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully thematically corral the cautious standoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, on the verge of succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from November 7.