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Adapted from the book by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama follows hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she escorts author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Director Kamura's first feature also resides in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into visually stunning marine dishes prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model aiming for a move to Seoul. However this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first conforming to her biases about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be acclaimed graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he manages to extract the story 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 another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth

Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in bursts of clandestine, sinuous moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, insisting on his loner ethic and sparing with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her desires on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Visual style – and restraint, with Sooha’s parent and partner both advocating plastic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it feels a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Acting and Directorial Approach

The trio of strong acts at the core – an nearly aggressive Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on absence, threatening to drown in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

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