Broker (2022)

Broker arrives from Hirokazu Kore-eda, a director who has spent two decades building small, patient films about people who form families out of scrap and necessity. Here he moves to South Korea and assembles a cast of Korean actors for a Korean story, which is to say the film's representation is entirely internal to its setting and makes no case for itself on that front. Song Kang-ho plays a church volunteer who skims abandoned infants from a baby box and sells them on the adoption black market. A young mother (Lee Ji-eun) decides to tag along. A pair of detectives follows. A child from an orphanage stows away in the van. The van becomes a family, which is the only argument the film is interested in making.

The film's social consciousness is gentle and specific. It notices the stigma that attaches to single mothers and lets a female detective carry the moral weight of the investigation, though it never converts this into a thesis. The baby-selling operation gestures at the commodification of children, and the people running it are broke and sympathetic, so the critique lands softly. Nothing here is shouted. Nobody is lectured. Kore-eda asks questions and then lets the questions sit, which is a rare and slightly unfashionable approach.

The result is warm, unhurried, and largely free of the sermonizing that has become standard in contemporary drama. Whether that counts as a virtue depends on what you want from a film about stolen babies. It won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes and made Song Kang-ho the first Korean actor to take Best Actor there, and the whole thing ends with a laundry van driving away while a mother runs toward her son. It is a good film. It is not, by any measure available to this office, an ideological one.