Broker film review — baby-trafficking tale finds room for the kind-hearted

A night sky pours with rain to open Broker. Though the South Korean city under it is Busan not Seoul, you may be put in mind of Parasite, that Oscar-winning satire with an epic set-piece of a flooded capital. The likeness isn’t coincidental: cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo shot both films. But the director here is Japanese maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda, his worldview more doggedly humanist than Parasite’s creator Bong Joon-ho.

Yet he also starts with a sadder sight than anything in Bong’s serrated family portrait. Here there is no family at all: just an abandoned newborn, left in a church “baby box”. That overture looks set to lead to a still bleaker outcome: the child is stolen by traffickers. Or is salvation already pending? The criminals are being tracked by cops: women officers staking them out with takeaway ramen and pork knuckle.

Admirers of the gauzy delicacy Kore-eda brought to such modern classics as Shoplifters may pause at the flavour of a hard-bitten thriller. But Broker is nothing if not a film of surprises. And so the cop opera becomes just one aspect of a tale that sees the baby spirited across Korea: a swaddled-up mix of road movie, social realism, crime cliffhanger and even knockabout comedy. Genres collide. A little like life.

Expectations will be tweaked most by the amateur traffickers, revealed as kind-hearted “cupids” — bringing together unwanted children and the unwillingly childless. In making that leap of morality stick, the film is helped by the casting of Song Kang-ho, another veteran of Parasite, whose everyman charm makes it easy to go along for the ride. Some will still recoil. Redact all the loveable bad guys from cinema history, though, and endless great movies go with them. And what Kore-eda always does so well is find good homes for our sympathy everywhere.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from February 24