Winter in Sokcho Review: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Tale of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Based on a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama centers on guesthouse worker Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city 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 unborn, trapped between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the mysterious author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into visually stunning marine dishes cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model aiming for a relocation to the capital. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider settles in for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about rude French men, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in search of inspiration, he succeeds in extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a vent – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Inner Turmoil and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in flashes of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan remains a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and control, with Sooha’s parent and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Obsessing over emptiness, threatening to drown in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
The film can be seen on Mubi from November 7.
