Winter in Sokcho Analysis: An Atmospheric Slow-Burn Tale of Family and Closeness in a South Korean Border City
Based on a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Koya Kamura’s debut film also resides in a liminal space of the spirit, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between two cultures. Once the French-speaking employee is compelled to accompany the mysterious author, she lingers uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and complex desire.
Daily Life and Upheaval
If not enjoying visually stunning seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model aiming for a move to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a extended visit. At first matching her biases about rude French men, he turns out, 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 observes him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.
Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers
Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in flashes of secret, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s profession, it seems a bit separate from the primary narrative, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.
Performances and Directorial Approach
The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the cautious standoff between innkeeper and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over emptiness, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.
Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from November 7.