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Based on a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film follows hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ 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 French father while she was still in utero, trapped between two cultures. Once the French-speaking employee is compelled to chaperone the mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Upheaval

If not enjoying visually stunning marine dishes prepared by her mother who sells fish (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Gong Do-yu), an hopeful model gunning for a relocation to the capital. However this comfy routine is disrupted when the outsider settles in for a extended visit. At first conforming to her prejudices about impolite Frenchmen, he proves, on Googling him, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in pursuit of creative fuel, he succeeds in extract the account of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Thematic Depth

Sooha’s subterranean feelings surface in bursts of secret, sinuous moments of physical constraint 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 imposes her needs on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness prevents Winter in Sokcho from reaching its full potential. Aesthetic expression – and restraint, with Sooha’s mother and boyfriend both pushing plastic surgery on her – is evidently a key theme for Kamura. But in spite of Yan’s profession, it feels a bit separate from the main story, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in the guesthouse.

Acting and Directorial Approach

The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile 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 narratively contain the wary faceoff between hotelier and guest, he is consistently on his toes emotionally speaking, often dipping into a physical, sensory imagery. Obsessing over absence, threatening to succumb in internal sensations, Kamura creates an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

The film is available on the streaming service from November 7.