Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Familial Bonds and Closeness in a Korean Border City
Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Koya Kamura’s first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still unborn, trapped between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Disruption
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a move to Seoul. However this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he succeeds in prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in flashes 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 stingy 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. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s profession, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in residence.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Obsessing over absence, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.
The film is available on Mubi from 7 November.
