🔗 Share this article Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burn Tale of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Frontier Town Based on the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and complex desire. Daily Life and Upheaval When she’s not digging into visually stunning marine dishes prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model aiming for a move to Seoul. However this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer 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 another figure entirely. Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in flashes of secret, sinuous moments of physical constraint and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and partner both advocating cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse. Performances and Cinematic Craft The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between innkeeper and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale. Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from November 7.