🔗 Share this article Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Story of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Border City Based on a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also resides in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between dual heritages. Once the francophone hostess is compelled to chaperone the mysterious author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction. Daily Life and Disruption When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model aiming for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is overturned when the outsider settles in for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he succeeds in extract the story 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 Symbolic Layers Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of clandestine, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in residence. Performances and Directorial Approach The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on emptiness, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of modern ghost story. The film is available on Mubi from 7 November.