Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she drives author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's first feature also resides in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and complex desire.
Everyday Existence and Disruption
If not enjoying visually stunning marine dishes cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider takes up residence for a extended visit. At first matching her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he succeeds in prise the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She observes him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in bursts of clandestine, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over absence, on the verge of drown in internal sensations, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
The film is available on the streaming service from November 7.
