Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also resides in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. After the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in search 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 another figure entirely.
Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in bursts of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and partner both advocating cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Cinematic Craft
The trio of strong acts at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully thematically corral the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on emptiness, threatening to succumb in internal sensations, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of modern ghost story.
The film is available on Mubi from 7 November.
