Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Story of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a South Korean Frontier Town
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing film follows guesthouse worker Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Director Kamura's debut film also resides in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still unborn, trapped between dual heritages. Once the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the mysterious author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model aiming for a move to Seoul. However this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the outsider takes up residence for a extended visit. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he manages to extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of physical constraint and release. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in residence.
Performances and Cinematic Craft
The three focused performances at the core – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and guest, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.