Sokcho in Winter Review: A Moody Slow-Burning Tale of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Border City
Inspired by the book by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still unborn, caught between dual heritages. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is overturned when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he manages to extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his solitary principles and stingy with particulars of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both advocating cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit separate from the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in residence.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully thematically corral the wary faceoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Obsessing over absence, on the verge of drown in internal sensations, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on Mubi from November 7.
