Review: 'Broker' is a tenderly rendered tale of illegal adoption, and the makeshift family brought together by desperation

The Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu hops over to Korea to make his latest film, “Broker,” but he keeps what has worked for him before: A sly intelligence and an empathy for people living on life’s margins and creating a found family.

The story begins when So-Ahn (Lee Ji Eun) leaves a baby on the sidewalk outside a church in Busan. Then another woman, Soo-jin (Doona Bae), gets out of a car, and puts the baby in a “baby box” — a sort of night depository for abandoned babies. Two volunteers inside the church, Sang-hyeon (Song Kang Ho, the poor dad from “Parasite”) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong Won), decide to take the baby, with the intent of finding a couple to adopt the kid outside legal channels.

Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, soon reveals that this isn’t the first time Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo have done this. Soo-jin knows this, because she’s a police sergeant who’s staking them out, with a junior detective, Lee (Joo Young Lee), in hopes of busting them for human trafficking.

This time, though, something’s different in the pattern. This time, the baby’s mother, So-Ahn, comes back to talk to the church workers. So-Ahn tells the men that she wants in, to get a cut of the money — 10 million won, a shade over $8,000 — that will come from selling the baby to a wealthy couple.

The three of them hop in a beat-up delivery van, from Song-hyeon’s laundry business, and drive to meet a prospective couple. Something about them, though, feels fishy about the couple’s haggling, so So-Ahn unilaterally rejects the deal. And the three reluctant business partners hit the road.

The group arrives at an orphanage, which is where Dong-soo grew up. Song-hyeon tells So-Ahn that Dong-soo aged out of the orphanage, because no one would adopt him — because his mother left a note saying she would someday come back for him. So-Ahn left a similar note with her baby boy, whom she named Woo-Song, and wonders aloud whether she really meant it.

Leaving the orphanage, the group realize they have a stowaway, the soccer-loving Hae-jin (Im Seung Soo). With the kid added to the mix, this group starts coalescing into a sort of makeshift family. But Soo-jin and Detective Lee are still staking them out — which is complicated when Soo-jin learns from HQ that a local mob boss has been murdered, the baby is the mobster’s child, and So-Ahn may be a suspect in the boss’s death.

As he did with “Shoplifters” (which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2018), Kore-eda paints a rich portrait of people living on society’s edges, trying to get by with what they can scrape together — even if those methods aren’t legal. Yes, it’s weird to have a movie where you’re supposed to empathize with black-market baby brokers, but as Kore-eda peels away the layers of the onion, we start to empathize with Dong-soo’s orphan background and So-Ahn’s desperation to save her baby from a bad life. 

In “Broker,” Kore-eda is blessed with a strong ensemble of actors, who capture the quirks of each character and manage to meld them into a powerful unit — a family, for lack of a better world.

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‘Broker’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language.  Running time: 130 minutes; in Korean with subtitles.