Sokcho in Winter Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Inspired by the book by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet refreshing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s first feature also camps in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still unborn, trapped between dual heritages. Once the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a move to Seoul. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he manages to prise the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a remote presence, upholding his loner ethic and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and boyfriend both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit separate from the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in residence.
Acting and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give 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 physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, threatening to drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from 7 November.
