Sokcho in Winter Analysis: A Moody Slow-Burning Tale of Family and Closeness in a Korean Border City
Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film 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 French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Everyday Existence and Upheaval
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model gunning for a move to Seoul. However this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he succeeds in extract the story 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.
Inner Turmoil and Thematic Depth
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs 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 mother and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed 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 consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Obsessing over emptiness, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.
