Foreign Film Series: Broker
A young lady decides to give up her newborn child to a church for adoption but discovers that there is an active group that steals these children for sale. She catches the group red handed and joins them in an exciting road trip to find customers ready to buy the child. Broker is an accessible, high-concept genre movie that brings to mind the Coen brothers. Sang-hyun is the owner of a small launderette in Busan. He is proud of his work, but he is being leaned on by local gangsters, so he resorts to another, far less legal job: he sells babies. A church near his launderette has a "baby box" by the front door, a hatch with a basket inside where new mothers can leave unwanted infants.
Sang-hyun's big-hearted right-hand man, Dong-soo, works part-time at the church, so if a baby arrives while he is on duty, he spirits it away and erases the CCTV footage. The partners in crime then set up a black-market adoption. The going rate for boys is a lot higher than it is for girls, but they always take care to ensure that the baby is going to suitably caring parents. Broker keeps on getting funnier and knottier, as secret motives are revealed, sympathies shift, mysteries deepen, and dangers multiply. It is, on one level, a farcical crime caper, but it is so elegantly plotted that it never seems contrived.