Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive but bracing drama sees guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) drive French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) out to the demilitarised zone just north of the South Korean city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.
When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.
Sooha’s subterranean feelings erupt in the bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious bandaged diner also in residence.
The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Zem, increasingly scattered 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 guest, he is always on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.
• Winter in Sokcho is on Mubi from 7 November.
