Broker (2022) Review: Kore-eda's Soft-Hearted Crime Story

Is Broker worth watching?

Yes, with reservations. Broker is a warm, wonderfully acted road movie about people society has written off, though it is gentler and tidier than Hirokazu Kore-eda’s best work. The strongest reason to watch is the ensemble, led by Song Kang-ho and a quietly remarkable IU, who turn an unlikely group of outlaws into something that feels like a family. The reservation is that the film’s kindness sometimes softens a story that could have cut deeper.

What is Broker about?

Broker begins on a rainy night in Busan, when a young woman leaves her infant son at a church baby box. Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a debt-ridden laundry owner, and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), who works at the baby box facility, quietly take the child, planning to sell him to adoptive parents willing to pay. When the mother, So-young (IU), comes back for him, she ends up joining the brokers on the road to vet the buyers herself.

They are not travelling alone. Two detectives, played by Bae Doona and Lee Joo-young, have been watching the pair and follow at a distance, waiting to catch the sale in progress. Kore-eda wrote and directed the film, his first in Korean. It is a South Korean production that runs 129 minutes, and it premiered in competition at Cannes in 2022, where Song Kang-ho won the festival’s Best Actor award.

An ensemble built on small kindnesses

Kore-eda has always been better at behaviour than plot, and Broker’s pleasures are in the way these people slowly learn each other. Song plays Sang-hyun as a man who cannot stop being decent even while committing a crime, fussing over nappies and mending clothes with the same absent-minded care. It is a smaller, sadder performance than his work in Parasite, and all the better for its restraint.

IU gives the film its backbone. So-young is guarded, sharp-tongued and unwilling to play the grateful or repentant mother anyone expects, and IU keeps her reasons at a distance without making her cold. Gang Dong-won brings a boyish hurt to Dong-soo, whose own history with abandonment shapes how he sees the baby, and Bae Doona, as the lead detective, gets some of the film’s most interesting moral turns simply by sitting in a parked car and watching.

The road movie as a moral argument

The van journey gives Kore-eda a loose, generous shape. As the group drives between prospective buyers, conversations about price turn into arguments about worth, and the film keeps asking, without lecturing, whether a child is better off with the people who want him or the people who are supposed to have him. Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography keeps the frame soft and rain-washed, and the film finds a lot of feeling in small domestic rituals inside cramped spaces.

The detectives’ parallel storyline is a clever counterweight. It lets the film look at the brokers from the outside, as suspects, while the main story insists on seeing them as people. That double view is the film’s smartest idea.

Where the tenderness smooths the edges

The trouble is that Broker likes its characters so much it rarely lets them be truly compromised. A subplot involving outside threats to the group feels imported from a more conventional crime film, and several late developments are resolved with a neatness that Kore-eda’s Shoplifters would never have allowed. At 129 minutes, the middle stretch also idles, repeating its buyer-visits pattern once too often.

Who should watch Broker?

It is ideal for viewers who enjoy slow, humane drama about chosen families, and for fans of Song Kang-ho and IU who want to see them in a quieter register. It is not a thriller, despite the detectives; expect a gentle pace and more conversation than tension. Themes include child abandonment and some violence, handled with care rather than graphically.

Two natural companions:

• Shoplifters, Kore-eda’s sharper, more painful take on the same idea of a family assembled outside the law.
• Parasite, for Song Kang-ho in a very different story about poverty and the families it shapes.

The verdict

Broker is a lovely, sometimes too gentle film, carried by performances that make its unlikely family feel completely real. It does not reach the heights of Shoplifters, and its crime story is its weakest strand, but its compassion is hard to resist.

Rating: 4/5