Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Tale of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Frontier Town
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet refreshing drama follows guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind 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 loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into visually stunning marine dishes prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model aiming for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he succeeds in extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and sparing with details of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on emptiness, on the verge of drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from November 7.
