Sokcho in Winter Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Tale of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City
Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet refreshing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s first feature 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, trapped between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is compelled to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model aiming for a move to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to extract the story 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 another figure entirely.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of clandestine, winding moments of physical constraint and liberation. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his solitary principles and stingy with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent 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 adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The trio of strong acts at the core – an nearly aggressive 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 thematically corral the cautious standoff 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 succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from 7 November.
