Sokcho in Winter Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Frontier Town
Adapted from the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama 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. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between strained companionship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Disruption
If not enjoying spectacular-looking marine dishes cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her biases about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be acclaimed comic book writer 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 air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.
Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in bursts of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan stays a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in residence.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Kim, and the self-involved Park – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over absence, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.
