Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Story of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Frontier Town
Based on a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. After the francophone hostess is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider settles in for a extended visit. At first conforming to her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he manages to extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a air duct – 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 clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with details of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Acting and Cinematic Craft
The trio of strong acts at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.
Winter in Sokcho is available on Mubi from 7 November.
