🔗 Share this article

Inspired by the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet refreshing drama follows hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between dual heritages. After the French-speaking employee is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.

Daily Life and Disruption

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model gunning for a move to the capital. However this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. At first matching her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he succeeds in 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 erupt in flashes of clandestine, winding moments of physical constraint and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and boyfriend both advocating plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.

Acting and Cinematic Craft

The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.

Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.