Review Korean Movie Broker (2022)

Oct 15, 2022

So-yeong (played by Lee Ji-eun) is a mother who tries to deliver her baby to a baby box outside at a church. Far from a purely innocent figure, So-yeong actually ends up setting the tone for much of the narrative. We quickly learn, for example, that the baby box drop-off was a ruse, and So-yeong questions why they didn't just leave the baby with the orphanage. Sang-hyeon (played by Song Kang-ho) notes that while the orphanage looks pleasant to outsiders, the kids there would rather have parents- and parents will pay big money for a healthy baby.

Well, in the abstract. One of the odder elements here is how Sang-hyeon often comes off like a salesman of rare objects whose main obstacle is convincing buyers that the objects are rare at all. Desperate couples often end up being rather picky. Then there's the whole matter of how selling babies is very much illegal. This is how Soo-jin (played by Bae Doona) enters the story as a woman in shadowy pursuit of the main entourage, her actual motives starting out vague and gradually filled in as time goes on.

Despite the often fundamentally optimistic tone of "Broker" in general the movie gives off surprisingly thick noir vibes. The core motivation for the main characters aren't anything to do with emotion or melodrama, just the harsh practicality of the fact that they need money, have a baby, and so would like to trade the baby for money. Dong-soo (played by Gang Dong-won) is Sang-hyeon's partner and So-yeong's love interest, and bridges these aspects quite effectively.

Yet despite competency in parts, I found the malaise in "Broker" to be underwhelming overall, mainly because the movie's lacking in any particularly obvious point. The construction kind of reminded me of "Burning" of all things. We're constantly seeing elements of economic deprivation and despair, there's just not much for writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda to do with them because the movie is anchored around the road trip to try and find decent parents for the baby.

The characters in "Broker" are also lacking due to a general absence of compelling flaws. So-yeong is mean and vicious in general, to the point she really doesn't seem like good material and knows it. But that's just the problem. So-yeong ends the movie in almost the exact place she started. So-yeong is nice at the end more because the baby situation isn't stressing her out more than because she's made a deliberate lifestyle change.

All the other characters have the same problem. They're only changed by their experience with baby broking because of it's practical impacts on their lives. The experience itself didn't really do anything except send them all on a road trip that feels more like an awkward family vacation than an active criminal conspiracy. "Broker" doesn't make crime seem cool so much as it makes crime seem normal- perhaps a decent comment on the human condition in general, but it really doesn't work that well with such a specific crime.