Sokcho in Winter Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also resides in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he proves, after an online search, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he succeeds in prise the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.
Inner Turmoil and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in bursts of clandestine, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a remote presence, upholding his solitary principles and sparing with particulars of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Acting and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, increasingly scattered Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the wary faceoff between hotelier and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Obsessing over absence, threatening to succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.
