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Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still unborn, trapped between dual heritages. After the francophone hostess is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and complex desire.

Daily Life and Disruption

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is relaxing with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model aiming for a move to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about rude French men, he turns out, after an online search, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he succeeds in extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions surface in bursts of clandestine, winding moments of physical constraint and release. We are privy to only her inner life, though; Yan remains a remote presence, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance hinders Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. Yet despite Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the main story, like the enigmatic 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-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the cautious standoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on absence, threatening to drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho is available on the streaming service from November 7.