Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burn Story of Family and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City

Inspired by a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. After the francophone hostess is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Everyday Existence and Disruption

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the outsider takes up residence for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to 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 another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness 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 key theme for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s profession, it feels a bit adjacent to the main story, like the enigmatic bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.

Performances and Cinematic Craft

The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.