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Inspired by a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing drama centers on guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also resides in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still unborn, caught between two cultures. Once the francophone hostess is compelled to chaperone the enigmatic author, she lingers uncomfortably between strained companionship and complex desire.

Daily Life and Disruption

If not enjoying spectacular-looking 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 relocation to Seoul. But this familiar rhythm is disrupted when the foreigner settles in for a extended visit. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in flashes of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and release. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a distant figure, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with details of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s mother and partner both pushing plastic surgery on her – is clearly a central idea for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.

Performances and Cinematic Craft

The trio of strong acts at the core – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

The film can be seen on the streaming service from 7 November.