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Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the demilitarised zone just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also resides 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. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to chaperone the mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Everyday Existence and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is relaxing with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to Seoul. However this familiar rhythm is overturned when the outsider takes up residence for a extended visit. At first conforming to her biases about impolite Frenchmen, he turns out, after an online search, to be acclaimed comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he manages to extract the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She observes 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 subterranean feelings surface in flashes of clandestine, winding moments of physical constraint and release. We witness only her internal world, though; Yan stays a remote presence, insisting on his loner ethic and stingy with particulars of his history. His cipher status, as Sooha imposes her desires on to him, is deliberate – 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 plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit separate from the main story, like the mysterious wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Performances and Cinematic Craft

The trio of strong acts at the centre – an nearly aggressive Zem, increasingly scattered Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park Mi-hyeon – give Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura can’t quite narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over absence, threatening to drown in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of modern ghost story.

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