Winter in Sokcho Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Tale of Family and Intimacy in a South Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) 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 resides in a liminal space of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her French father while she was still unborn, trapped between dual heritages. After the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood prepared by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model aiming for a move to Seoul. But this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in 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 vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan stays a remote presence, upholding his loner ethic and sparing with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both advocating plastic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in residence.
Performances and Cinematic Craft
The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Kim, and the self-involved Park – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, on the verge of drown in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
The film can be seen on the streaming service from November 7.
