Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Tale of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Border City
Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she drives author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also resides in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, trapped between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Disruption
If not enjoying spectacular-looking marine dishes cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about rude French men, he proves, on Googling him, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers 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 inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.
Acting and Cinematic Craft
The trio of strong acts at the centre – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of modern ghost story.
The film is available on Mubi from November 7.
