A wonderfully strange twist on a road movie, “Broker” is the darker version of “Little Miss Sunshine,” not that “Little Miss Sunshine” was all sweetness and light. Written and directed by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda (“After the Storm”), “Broker” bears some resemblance to Koreeda’s Academy Award-nominated 2018 effort “Shoplifters.” We’re still in the world of familial grifters in “Broker,” which tells the story of a couple of South Korean baby traffickers, who aren’t exactly what you’d expect.
Song Kang-ho of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “The Host” fame plays Sang-hyeon, the notably paternal leader of the two-man trafficking team. When he isn’t selling babies to married couples who desperately want them, Sang-hyeon runs a dry cleaning and tailor business. No one sews a button better than he. His partner in crime is the younger and taller Dong-soo (Dong-won Gang, “Peninsula”). Sang-hyeon owes money that he lost gambling to local gangsters. He and Dong-soo are given a baby named Woo-sung (Ji-yung Park), who was left at the Busan Family Church on a suitably rainy night, to sell. They load the kid up in Sang-hyeon's beat-up, smoke-belching delivery van and hit the road in the picturesque coastal Busan region. Their first stop is an orphanage, where Dong-soo grew up, waiting for the mother who left him to return for him. She never did.
Also along for the ride is the baby’s mother So-young (Ji-eun Lee), a young prostitute with a dark secret. After leaving the orphanage, the group discovers that Hae-jin (Seung-soo Im), a soccer-mad elementary school-age orphan, has stowed away to travel with them. Hae-jin bonds with the others.
