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Inspired by the book by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Kim Bella) as she drives French writer 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 spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still unborn, trapped between dual heritages. Once the francophone hostess is compelled to accompany the enigmatic author, she loiters uneasily between strained companionship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood cooked by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is disrupted when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. At first matching her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he manages to extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s subterranean feelings erupt in flashes of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and stingy with details of his history. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her desires 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 clearly a central idea for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in residence.

Acting and Cinematic Craft

The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Roschdy Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-involved Park Mi-hyeon – provide Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Obsessing over absence, on the verge of drown in subjective feelings, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho can be seen on the streaming service from 7 November.