Sokcho in Winter Analysis: A Moody Slow-Burning Tale of Family and Intimacy in a Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet refreshing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Director Kamura's first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned 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 loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
Daily Life and Disruption
When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first matching her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he succeeds in prise the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Inner Turmoil and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan remains a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and stingy with details of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness hinders 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 central idea for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Cinematic Craft
The trio of strong acts at the centre – an nearly aggressive Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored 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 hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on emptiness, threatening to succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from 7 November.
