Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Dong-won Gang) run an elaborate scheme in which they take babies left at a drop box of the local church which they work across the street from.  Once they have the infants, they find parents on the adoption black market who are willing to pay a handsome sum for the children.  Things go awry, however, when one of the mothers, So-young (Ji-eun Lee), returns for her baby only to find him missing.  Together, the trio makes their way cross-country to interview potential parents for baby Woo-Sung all while an investigation into the trafficking heist is closing in on them. 

Hirokazu Kore-eda debuted Broker at the 2022 installment of Cannes where the film was picked up by Neon for a state-side release.  It explores many of the complicated themes and topics of the idea of the family up against modern struggles which Kore-eda’s previous works also plumb, but also like many of his previous films, this too falls apart a little towards the end as it relies a little too heavily on sentiment and tragedy.  It is an understandable crutch given that life itself is not without its ups and downs, and at the risk of being too saccharine and neat, the characters do need to pay their penance, but it feels a little too cruel and out of left field in Broker.  It is not that these characters are exceptionally more fleshed out than his prior casts – his knack for creating deeply complicated yet sympathetic characters remains – but the chemistry among the cast here, a ragtag found family, is one that roots itself into the hearts of audiences with relative ease and to see how the unit fractures feels unnecessarily vicious.  

The ensemble cast is really what makes this film work and the affable nature of the three leads and the ultimate well-intentioned goals of the heist help to salve the fact that Broker follows a merry bunch of, to put it bluntly and a little cynically, human traffickers.  Kang-ho and Gang have very dynamic chemistry, benefiting from an evolving script that allows both characters to have depth, but it never holds the details too close to the heart which allows the actors plenty of material to color their performance.  Showing the rapport between the two characters is necessary to get audiences on their side because their actions that drive the film are not only illegal but also teetering into shades of immorality, though well-intentioned.  The film seeks to examine the adoption and fostering systems in place, and through Dong-soo’s own history of having grown up in the system and is seen as somewhat of a heroic figure for doing so, it posits that his success – albeit, achieved through a life of crime and fraud – that he has found any form of success in life at all is cause to celebrate.  This dynamic also allows for conversation between the two men, Dong-soo looking to give the children to the best possible parents while Sang-hyeon is a little more money-minded in his approach and the highest bidder is the ultimate goal even though he does bond with the infants in his own way.   

What throws a bit of a kink into this well-rehearsed plan by the two men is when So-young returns for the child.  She is still not ready to take on the child and raise it, but she wants to make sure that he goes to a good and loving home.  Her involvement in the plot, though, is one more of the heart than it is of commentary and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, it does add a bit more melodrama to an already overwrought film.  Lee, however, does deliver a great and touching performance that finds her as an unpredictable element in an established crime, having to shoulder the bulk of the film’s sentimentality, all while keeping audiences of a mother seeking to abandon her child sympathetic to the character.  It is not a simple or easy task, and she gets assistance in the latter half of the film when a stowaway, Hae-jin (Seung-soo Im), from the foster home, is discovered to have hitched a ride in their repurposed laundry van.  While Hae-jin’s inclusion in the story creates more of a big sister/little brother dynamic with So-young, Kore-eda’s script allows us to see shades of So-young as a mother, and because Hae-jin is old enough to talk but young enough to still have the blunt naivete of childhood about him, it allows for a deeper window into So-young’s philosophy and her guard is not as raised as it is when she has similar conversations with Sang-hyeon or Dong-soo. 

To prevent Broker from becoming too meandering and toothless, Kore-eda includes two detectives, Lee (Lee Joo-young) and Soo-jin (Bae Doona), who are in pursuit of the trio of traffickers. Their involvement helps to color the story in a more traditional, dramatic sense while still grappling with their own existential crises about parenthood, life, and love. It is a shame that this plot line brings about some debtors who are also on Sang-hyeon’s trail seeking payment on some outstanding debts, which brings in uncharacteristic and somewhat unnecessary violence to the final act of the film, but their involvement opens the door to the tragic coda which Kore-eda has been working towards across his 129-minute road trip. That being said, their involvement is still a little too much for the film to support, and it would have been a more enjoyable experience to see Lee and Soo-jin in an expanded role here as the film could still have ended largely in the same way but have been more clearly presented and streamlined throughout. 

Broker fits well into Kore-eda’s filmography; a handsomely made piece with complex characters and ending on a note that reminds audiences that while life can be bitter at times, it is not without a silver lining. It does lean a little heavy into the sentimentality of it all, even when taking the director’s history of themes into account, and as such its resolution does not feel as sweepingly cathartic as his devotees may be expecting. There is too much going on in the narrative to say that it is Kore-eda just going through the motions and creating a parody of his own style, but it does feel as if something is missing. It is a film not without heart or without tragedy, but it lands much softer – not because he is any more kind to this cast than others – but because there is not enough examination of why Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo participate in the scheme. Money is the root cause, sure, but whereas his previous works find people with their backs against the wall and nowhere else to turn except for the grey area of morality, Sang-hyeon in particular here is a little too put together for the film to work as it appears to have been intended. Dong-soo, having come from the foster system, and So-young, a well-intentioned but unprepared mother make up the driving dynamic of the film, and while the narrative still frames Sang-hyeon as the ringleader of the scheme, he is the emotional third wheel whose desperation was much more self-inflicted. That is not to lessen his plight, but it needs to be stated that this role is an outlier not just in the context of Broker, but also in the context of Kore-eda’s body of work, too, and it just does not work as well as it should because of that ever so slight change.