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Based on a novel by Korean-Swiss writer Elisa Dusapin, this elusive yet refreshing drama centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she drives author from France Yan (Zem Roschdy) to the DMZ just north of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s first feature also camps in a no man’s land of the spirit, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still unborn, caught between dual heritages. Once the francophone hostess is compelled to accompany the enigmatic author, she lingers uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking marine dishes prepared by her mother who sells fish (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an hopeful model aiming for a relocation to the capital. However this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner takes up residence for a extended visit. Initially conforming to her biases about rude French men, he proves, after an online search, to be critically lauded comic book writer Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a vent – but the question lingers whether he’s a surrogate parent, or something else.

Inner Turmoil and Thematic Depth

Sooha’s subterranean feelings erupt in bursts of secret, winding moments of bodily suffocation and release. We witness only her inner life, though; Yan remains a distant figure, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His cipher status, as Sooha projects her desires on to him, is deliberate – but this one-sidedness prevents 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 key theme for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the primary narrative, like the enigmatic wrapped guest also in residence.

Acting and Cinematic Craft

The three focused performances at the centre – an almost hostile Zem, progressively unmoored Bella Kim, and the self-absorbed Park – provide Winter in Sokcho its emotional anchor, and if Kamura doesn't fully narratively contain the cautious standoff between hotelier and visitor, he is always on his toes in terms of feeling, often exploring a tactile visual register. Fixating on emptiness, threatening to succumb in subjective feelings, Kamura musters an fascinating kind of contemporary phantom tale.

The film is available on Mubi from 7 November.