129 min | R | December 26, 2022 | Neon
A desperate mother drops her newborn in a church baby box. Two small-time crooks snatch him to sell on the adoption black market, then she comes back and joins the hustle. It is a road movie about trafficking a baby that wants very badly to make you cry, and mostly succeeds.
A desperate mother leaves her baby at a church baby box. Two men who run a small laundry intercept the infant before the system can. They plan to sell him to adoptive parents on the black market and pocket the fee. The mother returns, discovers the scheme, and instead of calling the police she joins them on the road to vet the buyers. Hirokazu Kore-eda builds the film around a moral question he refuses to flatten. He asks whether people who do an indefensible thing can still construct something that looks like love.
Song Kang-ho plays Sang-hyun as a man drowning in debt who sells babies and tells himself it is mercy. He smiles through every transaction and you can see the calculation behind the warmth. Gang Dong-won plays Dong-soo, an orphan who grew up in an institution and now brokers other abandoned children. His tenderness toward the baby carries the grief of his own abandonment. IU plays So-young with a guarded flatness that slowly cracks. Bae Doona plays Detective Su-jin, the cop tailing the group, with a contempt that curdles into something closer to envy.
Kore-eda writes and directs in the patient observational mode he has used since his documentary work. He shoots the van interiors in tight quiet compositions that turn the vehicle into a moving living room. The camera holds on faces after the dialogue stops and lets the silence do the work. One scene places the makeshift family in a darkened hotel room where each person thanks the baby for being born. The staging is simple and the emotional accounting is precise.
The film is generous to a fault. Kore-eda extends so much grace to his characters that the criminal stakes evaporate. The buyers are reasonable. The cops soften. The found family coheres too smoothly for a story built on selling a child. This is Kore-eda working in his familiar register of broken people assembling a chosen family out of the wreckage. He has made this film before and made it sharper. The warmth is real and the rigor is missing.