Winter in Sokcho Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Based on the book by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Everyday Existence and Upheaval
If not enjoying spectacular-looking marine dishes prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a move to the capital. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. At first conforming to her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he succeeds in prise the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s subterranean feelings erupt in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan remains a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea 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.
Acting and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on emptiness, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on Mubi from November 7.
