Song Kang-ho

In Broker (2022), Song Kang-ho’s Sang-hyun is funny company, and his business is selling babies. Song does not treat those activities as a joke, but neither does he play the man as someone from whom we must recoil. We laughed and then felt uneasy: Song had made a baby broker someone we were pleased to spend time with. That warmth matters because it makes the awkward travelling company plausible even when the plot is not. We recommend the performance with fewer reservations than the film.

The leading roles in Joint Security Area (2000) and The Foul King (2000) established him after earlier supporting parts. Repeated collaborations with Kim Jee-woon and Bong Joon-ho became central to his work; Memories of Murder (2003) began the partnership with Bong. The Host (2006) gave that partnership room for both genre filmmaking and family drama. Parasite (2019) brought wider international recognition. Through these changes, the familiar figure is a man whose humour does not spare him loneliness or vulnerability.

Fathers and working men recur in his films, and their ordinariness can obscure how carefully he plays them. His precise speech carries character even through subtitles. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker, the ensemble gives his warmth somewhere useful to go: Gang Dong-won, as Dong-soo, supplies a quieter presence against which Song’s more expansive manner makes sense. The two do not need to compete for our attention. We believe that these people might want to stay together, which is a considerable service to a plot that keeps adding complications.

The limit is clear in Broker: Song’s warmth cannot make every complication convincing. Kore-eda sometimes pleads for sympathy, and the crowded plotting gives us reasons to resist. Song still allows us to enjoy Sang-hyun’s company without suggesting that his activities are harmless, which is more useful than playing him as a warning. See it for the ensemble, with patience for the story’s efforts to win us over. — Fi1m