The movie starts with a young woman in torrential rain. Soaked to the bone, she struggles up stairs and through streets, until finally reaching the outside of a church. Here she kneels down, and from her coat produces a baby which she leaves near a hatch in the wall. It’s a baby box.
Baby boxes are real things in South Korea. They offer a safe space for mothers to leave their infants with the purpose of having them adopted by those who can better care for them. Korea has a real stigma attached to adoption, and with a law “restricting international adoption” (BBC 2/10/15), there is a large number of unwanted babies.
Ha Sang-hyeon (Kang ho Song) and Dong-Soo (Gang Dong-Won) are two employees of the church. Carefully collecting the baby, they quickly delete the security camera footage inside the baby box. They are brokers. For a surprisingly low sum of money, (around £6000), they sell these babies to couples who can’t have a child of their own.
Wracked with guilt however, the mother (Lee Ji-eun) returns, becoming part of the brokers’ journey as they search for a suitable match. Amongst their travels they pick up an unlikely addition. Now a group of five, the troop begin to bond forming a kind of surrogate family, providing care that each character desperately needs.
"thank you for being born"
Though the two men take extreme care both over the infant and when choosing a suitable couple, it is still human trafficking. As a result, throughout their journey they are tailed by two police officers, Detective Lee (Lee Joo-Young) and Soo-jin (Bae Donna).
Hungry to catch them in the act of sale, these two women are constantly eating in their car as they stake out the unlikely group. It’s details like this, that make the film so incredibly immersive. Kore-eda’s visual storytelling is sublime. Whether it be through large landmarks or tiny facial expressions and ticks, a thousand words is said without any lips moving.
That’s not to say the dialogue isn’t fantastic too, because it is. Realistically empty at times, it hangs about the characters as they struggle to express what they really mean. Sound design too is a huge reason why the characters seem so real. There appears to be actual weight to their actions as they interact with the world around them.
In a touching scene, the mother addresses each character, all of whom have faced rejection, and says: “thank you for being born”. Made up of countless scenes like this, Broker demonstrates the universal need for love and the extreme importance of family, no matter how unconventional it may be.
