Winter in Sokcho Review: A Moody Slow-Burn Tale of Familial Bonds and Intimacy in a South Korean Frontier Town
Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing drama follows guesthouse worker Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's first feature also camps in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. Once the French-speaking employee is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking marine dishes cooked by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Gong Do-yu), 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 rude French men, he proves, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he manages to extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes 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 erupt in bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of physical constraint and release. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan remains a remote presence, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s profession, it seems a bit separate from the main story, like the enigmatic bandaged diner also in residence.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the core – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on emptiness, on the verge of drown in internal sensations, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.