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Inspired by a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this subtle yet bracing film centers on hotel employee Sooha (Bella Kim) as she escorts author from France Yan (Roschdy Zem) to the DMZ just north of the city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Director Kamura's debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her father from France while she was still in utero, trapped between dual heritages. Once the French-speaking employee is forced to accompany the mysterious author, she loiters uneasily between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

Daily Life and Upheaval

When she’s not digging into visually stunning seafood cooked by her fishmonger mother (Mi-hyeon Park), Sooha is lolling about with her partner (Do-yu Gong), an aspiring model gunning for a relocation to Seoul. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner 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 graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Arriving in Sokcho in pursuit of inspiration, he manages to prise the account of Sooha’s missing father from her. She spies on him through a air duct – but the question lingers whether he’s a proxy father, or another figure entirely.

Emotional Landscape and Symbolic Layers

Sooha’s buried emotions erupt in flashes of clandestine, sinuous moments of physical constraint and liberation. We are privy to only her internal world, though; Yan remains a remote presence, insisting on his solitary principles and sparing with details of his past. His enigmatic role, as Sooha projects her needs on to him, is intentional – but this imbalance prevents Winter in Sokcho from fully opening up. Aesthetic expression – and control, with Sooha’s parent and partner both advocating cosmetic surgery on her – is evidently a central idea for Kamura. But despite Yan’s vocation, it seems a bit adjacent to the main story, like the enigmatic bandaged diner also in residence.

Acting and Cinematic Craft

The three focused performances at the centre – an nearly aggressive 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 cautious standoff between innkeeper and guest, he is consistently on his toes in terms of feeling, often dipping into a tactile visual register. Fixating on emptiness, threatening to drown in internal sensations, Kamura musters an intriguing kind of contemporary phantom tale.

The film is available on Mubi from November 7.