Sokcho in Winter Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burning Story of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama follows guesthouse worker 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 first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the spirit, 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 mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
If not enjoying spectacular-looking marine dishes cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a move to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about rude French men, he turns out, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to extract the account 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.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of physical constraint and liberation. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan stays a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.
Acting and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from 7 November.
