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Adapted from the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film follows 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: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, left behind by her father from France while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model aiming for a relocation to the capital. However this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of creative fuel, he succeeds in extract the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth

Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in flashes of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan stays a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects 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 pushing cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s profession, it seems a bit separate from the main story, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Performances and Directorial Approach

The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Obsessing over absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of modern ghost story.

The film can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.