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Based on the book by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing drama follows guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives French writer Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Symbolism abounds: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the mysterious author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and complex desire.

Everyday Existence and Disruption

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 (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. At first matching her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he succeeds in prise the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes him through a air duct – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in flashes of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan stays a distant figure, upholding his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is intentional – but this one-sidedness hinders Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both advocating cosmetic surgery on her – is clearly a key theme for Kamura. Yet in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic bandaged diner also in the guesthouse.

Acting and Directorial Approach

The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – give Winter in Sokcho its solid centre, and if Kamura can’t quite thematically corral the wary faceoff between innkeeper and visitor, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a physical, sensory imagery. Fixating on emptiness, on the verge of succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

Winter in Sokcho can be seen on Mubi from 7 November.