Broker.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was my #3 film of that year, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, depicting a cobbled-together family of thieves who come together because the world beyond hasn’t provided them with the structure they desire. It’s a simple story where nothing substantial happens, deriving its huge emotional power from small interactions and gradual revelations about the five core characters.

Kore-eda’s most recent film, Broker, is his first Korean-language movie, and stars Song Kang-ho of Parasite as one of two baby ‘brokers’ who sell abandoned babies, illegally, to couples looking to adopt. It shares a core theme with Shoplifters, as we see five people come together to form another would-be family, one even closer to the dynamic of a biological family, but does so with more plot and more suspense than Shoplifters, counteracting the familiarity of the earlier film. (You can rent Broker on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Song plays Ha Sang-Hyeon, owner of a laundry business who also volunteers at a church where there’s a baby box, a place where anyone can leave a baby they wish to give up for adoption. He and his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal some of these babies to sell them on the black market for a few thousand dollars, which they also justify to themselves as saving the babies from going to an orphanage. This all goes awry when one mother, Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun, a K-pop singer who records as IU), comes back after abandoning her baby, and ends up accompanying the two men on their visits to would-be buyers. They’re pursued by two policewomen, Detectives Lee and Soo-jin, who have been trying to catch the baby brokers in the act of selling a child so they can arrest the two men, although it turns out that Soo-jin (Bae Doona) has additional motives for her ardor in this search.

The brilliance of both of these Kore-eda films lies in the telling, in the dialogue and the small moments and the way his characters reveal themselves through their interactions with each other and the world around them. All three of the main characters have elements in their histories that we learn as the film progresses that further explain their motivations, but more importantly just reveal more about who they are. The script is smarter than just connecting A to B, than saying that one character does something specific because some other thing happened in their past; it uses those past events to provide depth and definition to all three of the main characters, and even to a couple of the secondary characters as well.

Song earned the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2022 for his work in Broker, becoming the first Korean actor to win the honor there, continuing the rise in global acclaim that began with his work in Parasite, although he already had a few cases’ worth of honors in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia going back a quarter of a century. He’s the core of this transient family, and his understated performance in Broker gives the film the anchor that allows some of the other actors to go bigger with their individual characters. This is just Lee Ji-eun’s second major film role, and she’s a revelation – I doubt anyone would guess she was a singer by trade from watching her nuanced, affecting performance as a mother who has her reasons for wishing to give up her baby but is also determined to see him go to the right family. Just about every character here is damaged in some way, but none of the performances, even the side ones, are showy or loud.

I adored Shoplifters, and I think that colored my experience with Broker. Both revolve around makeshift families, and both understand that families can be what we make of them. Many people do not have the privilege of strong biological ties, of two parents or siblings or extended relations who are present in their lives, but both of these films explore the ways in which some people forge those relationships on their own – perhaps unwittingly, because we need that sort of connection in our lives. Broker is an excellent film, and is different enough from Shoplifters thanks to some of the suspense in the second half to stand on its own, but I also think I loved it a little less because it treads some ground familiar to me from the earlier film.