Winter in Sokcho Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Story of Family and Intimacy in a South Korean Frontier Town

Inspired by a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing film centers on guesthouse worker Sooha (Kim Bella) as she drives French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also resides in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is disrupted when the outsider settles in for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he succeeds in extract the story of Sooha’s missing father from her. She observes him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or another figure entirely.

Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with details of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and control, with Sooha’s parent and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Performances and Directorial Approach

The trio of strong acts at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, 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 musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho is available on Mubi from November 7.