🔗 Share this article

Adapted from a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the demilitarised zone just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's first feature also resides in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. Once the French-speaking employee is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Disruption

If not enjoying visually stunning marine dishes cooked by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model aiming for a move to the capital. But this comfy routine is overturned when the outsider takes up residence for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to extract the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.

Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth

Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of physical constraint and release. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan stays a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and sparing with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and boyfriend both advocating plastic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Acting and Directorial Approach

The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

The film can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.