In Broker, as it does in Magnolia, Mann’s song feels oneiric: wafting in like a chill, as if conjured from the edges of memory. It drifts through the window of a car, where policewoman Soo-jin (Bae Doona) is sheltering from the rain. She extends a limb outside, reaching her phone towards the music. ‘Listen to this song,’ she says to an unidentified caller – perhaps the lover we have glimpsed once or twice thus far, discarded in favour of the tortuous investigation at hand. ‘Remember, that movie we saw? It was in that.’ They talk domestics: clothes, rice, an acquaintance’s wedding. Then the camera closes in; her flinty froideur gives way to a sprinkle of tears. A brief surrender to freefall; to the currents of feeling that buoy this road movie from place to place, pitstop to pitstop, even when the terrain grows increasingly uneven.

Broker spends an awful amount of time in the car – an unusual setting for Kore-eda, the Japanese auteur whose three-decade career has largely unfurled in abodes of all varieties: the inner-city squalor of his Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters (2018), the pastoral splendour of Still Walking’s (2009) sun-soaked cottage, the urban apartment and ramshackle shophouse of Like Father, Like Son (2013). Home, for Kore-eda, is a faultline where family units are tried and tested, where kinships between relatives are splintered as easily as new ones are forged between strangers. Blood, often, gives way to a far more primitive urge: the instinct for survival, love, a glimmer of warmth on a rainy night.

The car becomes a makeshift home in Broker – for two parties. There’s Soo-jin and her junior colleague Lee (Lee Joo-young): a pair of detectives whose eyes grow increasingly frantic as they tail their targets night and day, pausing only for essential supplies. In their unmarked police vehicle, they scoff hard-boiled eggs, gummy bears, and lukewarm instant noodles – all the rough and tumble of a buddy cop duo without any of its high-wire thrills. Theirs is a stake-out shorn of tension and riddled with blunders, like an entrapment scheme that is instantly foiled, or a trail that goes cold after a hidden GPS tracker is discovered and tossed away.

Equally inept are the crooks in their sights. Far from the crime ring we might expect, they make an unlikely trio: laundry owner Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho, armed with the same goofball charisma here as his patriarch in Parasite) and his wily associate Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), a couple of small-time rascals who collude with So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a young mother with a mysterious past. Together, they hawk So-young’s newborn baby on the black market, hoping for a sizeable payday from prospective parents. 

Cast of Broker (photograph courtesy of Madman)

Those parents prove hard to come by. When they do materialise, they are often captious and unpleasant, displaying the nasty entitlement of wealth. ‘Did you use Photoshop by any chance?’ one couple interrogates. ‘He was cuter in the photo.’ And so these hapless crims embark on a cross-country expedition, traversing the South Korean coastline in their search for the right buyer. Soon, they are joined by an interloper: the mouthy orphan kid Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo) who has snuck into their backseat, spurred by the salty tang of adventure. After hours in their rickety van – broken door and all – each member of the squad warms up to one another. They pass easily as a nuclear family to a local traffic cop: three generations, with babe in arms. We might forget that they are the subjects of a nationwide investigation. Such is their hermetic bliss.

It doesn’t last, of course. Broker grows shaggy with narrative strands hinting at – if not explicitly detailing – the imminent despair looming over each of its characters. In a faraway hotel room, a body shows up; vague threats are dispatched via secret phone calls. This being a Kore-eda film, any actual violence is truncated, or subsumed under the haze of comedy – more slapstick than sanguinary. Even so, the whiff of danger can feel discombobulating: a reminder that any solace our ragtag gang of miscreants might find in one another is merely temporary. Kore-eda returns to the quandaries that have dogged all of his films to date: what ineffable bonds make a family? And can they hold under pressure?

For all its knotty enquiry, Broker finds a beating heart in So-young. Played by Lee Ji-eun – better known as the popstar IU – in one of her first leading film roles, So-young is mercurial and astringent, trapped in a web of intrigue with a child she fiercely loves but cannot keep. One morning on their road trip, she wakes up to gaze at the gauzy sheen of a dawning sky, towards an endless expanse of ocean. ‘I have this dream sometimes,’ she recounts, her steely resolve cracking open to reveal the muck of guilt underneath. ‘It’s raining … the rain washes away everything I was up to yesterday.’ Broker, too, is a cool shower: a gentle patter that rearranges its sorrows into something that looks like grace.

Broker (Madman), 129 minutes, is on national release from 30 March 2023.