‘Winter in Sokcho’ Review: A Subtle Tale of Solitude and Fleeting Connection (MUBI)

The relationships between people who work in tourist lodgings and the guests who visit them can take many forms. In more traditional hotels, they tend to be formal and bureaucratic. But in smaller places—family inns, boarding houses, guest homes—those relationships can acquire other tones, more intimate and personal. The one told in WINTER IN SOKCHO is not, strictly speaking, a love story, but it is one in which a certain intimacy emerges between characters from those two worlds. In this case, that intimacy comes more from the host than from the guest.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Elisa Shua Dusapin, WINTER IN SOKCHO takes place in Sokcho, a small tourist town in northern South Korea, off-season—when it’s empty and its once-busy beaches are closed. The protagonist, Soo-Ha (Bella Kim), works as an employee in an old, somewhat run-down but warm guesthouse, where she also cooks. Although she has a university degree and everyone believes she should be doing something else—perhaps marrying her boyfriend, who dreams of becoming a model—she seems content, or perhaps resigned, to stay there.

Her knowledge of foreign languages turns out to be useful when a man named Yan Kerrand (Roschdy Zem), a French visual artist, shows up at the guesthouse. Since she speaks fluent French, Soo-Ha becomes the bridge between Yan and the inn’s charismatic owner. Yan is a reserved man, terse and solitary, seemingly searching for inspiration for a new work. While Soo-Ha becomes increasingly drawn to him, he always seems more absorbed in his own world—a world about which we know almost nothing. By contrast, we do learn more about her, and some of those details explain her almost obsessive fascination with this older Frenchman.

WINTER IN SOKCHO follows the push and pull of a relationship that never quite flows, at least not in the way she wishes. He asks her for restaurant recommendations; she accompanies him on a tour of the DMZ—the so-called Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea, which is anything but demilitarized. There are conversations in which she makes all the effort, while he remains distant. Meanwhile, she has a strained relationship with her mother and, unsurprisingly, with her boyfriend, who seems too self-absorbed to notice what’s happening to her.

The film is less a love story than a portrait of two lonely people who cross paths, briefly, in a cold and half-empty town—an encounter that means different things to each of them. Told entirely from Soo-Ha’s point of view—she spies on him, googles him, even listens to his interviews (Yan is moderately famous)—it’s clear that, to him, she is little more than a polite, kind host. More than once—she’s not the only one to notice—it’s mentioned how brusque and unfriendly he is. “That’s just how the French people are,” Soo-Ha seems to tell the local shopkeeper after witnessing Yan’s curt behavior while buying painting materials.

Warm yet detached, with a few animated interludes that don’t entirely work, WINTER IN SOKCHO shares much with other Korean and Japanese films about solitary characters forming fleeting connections in quiet, unremarkable resort towns. A family drama in Soo-Ha’s past adds a more traditional emotional weight to the story, but overall, the film by the French-Japanese director Kamura sustains, to the very end, the tone of a delicate Asian short story about brief encounters that may seem inconsequential, yet somehow leave a lasting mark.