Review of The Great Flood / 대홍수, directed by Kim Byung-woo

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is coming out towards the end of 2025, and while I reflect on my artistic and literary output, I know in 2026 I want to do more. As a creative writer I really fell off the grind of creating new work, even though I was bursting with ideas sometimes, and I got really lazy. I also became really lazy with this blog in general too, as I was kind of burned out from it.

It also doesn’t help that my regular job, my 8-5, also has me producing blog content geared towards our industry. By the time I get home, I don’t want to write anything more and find myself doom scrolling more and more. I want to break out of that habit because I know it’s a bit destructive, and I can literally see my life slipping away before my eyes.

So during the holiday break, where I had two extra days off in a row, I ended up deciding to watch and read as much as I could while I could sleep in and stay awake late at night. I tend to be most productive with my own projects late at night, which hasn’t helped with the 8-5 job situation.

I saw that The Great Flood was trending on Netflix, then was confused once I realized it was a Korean movie. For context: I worked as a film critic for years and mainly covered Asian cinema, and even before that, in the academic world, I mainly focused on Asian literary and film output. Korea is my main beat (I literally did my master’s thesis on colonial Korean women’s literature), so whenever I see something trending on American Netflix from Korea I’m always intrigued, especially if I haven’t heard of it before.

That’s what got me to press play at midnight one night and watch this all the way through when I should’ve been sleeping. Let’s get into the review!

As a flood devastates Seoul and the planet, one AI researcher tries to save her son as the water continues to rise.

Our main character in this movie is An-na, a windowed mother of a young son named Ja-in. We get flashbacks here and there implying how and why her husband might have died, but for now she’s learning how to cope, while also raising her son and working as an AI researcher. But when vicious rain continues to climb and floods her apartment, she has to grab her son and start heading outside.

They join the throngs of confused people trying to evacuate their homes, but then An-na gets a call from the United Nations telling her to get to the roof. They’re going to get her and her son out of there by helicopter, but first the agents have to get to her and help her out. When Ja-in goes missing, An-na frantically looks for him, but it trapped in an apartment when a giant wave brings water inside. Hee-jo, one of the agents, pulls her out of there and rescues her.

Turns out the UN knew that there was an asteroid going to hit the North Pole, and the flooding is going to wipe everyone out. The governments of the world then decided to not save humanity and built a space station instead, trying to find ways to force human bodies to have consciousness through AI. An-na has been an inadvertent part of this research, and the first choice to evacuate has apparently died in the flooding with her son.

After finding Ja-in, another waves forces the mother and son a part. An-na is left on her own and finds a girl in an elevator stuck and about to drown, but she can’t do anything to save the girl. She eventually reaches the roof, where a SWAT team reveals Ja-in is actually AI. They can’t bring his physical body with them, which leads An-na to grieve the loss of her son physically.

They’re also going to leave everyone else behind, including Hee-jo. When he starts protesting, they shoot him in the head. An-na boards a space ship that’s one of the last out before the flooding reaches its peak, but asteroid remnants hit a piece, leaving us to think everyone on board is killed. The movie then flips back to the moment when An-na is in her apartment with the floodwater coming in.

She grabs Ja-in and leaves the apartment, but we see her get hit by a floating car and die. She wakes up with Hee-jo above her, as he saved her, and they go off to find Ja-in. She comes across the elevator with the girl inside and manages to save her this time, but the girl, named Ji-soo, informs her that some looters took Ja-in.

An-na goes to find him with the looters, and they almost kill her before Hee-jo gets into the apartment and stops them. Turns out this was Ji-soo’s grandparents’ apartment, and she decides to stay behind with them and die with the floodwaters. An-na suddenly remembers the loop she’s in, then she tells Hee-jo that they’re going to kill him. They evade the SWAT team, An-na realizes she’s been stuck in the same loop over a thousand times, and then heads to the roof to find Ja-in.

He’s there and they run from the SWAT team as a huge wave consumes them. We then flip again: back in the first timeline, An-na, dying of the debris impaling her, tells a new spacecraft rescue to extract her memories and mind to put them into the AI system. The fact she kept reliving that moment was the AI system trying to learn the emotional response of motherhood and the emotions tied to it, which works. The film ends with bodies being made for An-na and Ja-in with their memories and consciousness installed.

Overall Thoughts

Having watched a lot of disaster movies in the past few years, despite the general anxiety that comes with being alive in a world that’s consumed by climate change slowly but surely, I feel like this movie falls on the lower end of the spectrum for me. I see what it’s trying to do by appealing about AI and motherhood in general, but it feels kind of empty to me.

The loop and what it entails also lowers the stakes for me. There simply wasn’t enough tension to keep it going, and by the time we get to the end of the movie, I feel like this film and its story has lot a lot of the steam and anxiety it had set up in the beginning. Like I saw promise in it, but it kind of falls flat.

I also wasn’t interested in these characters in general. They lacked complexity and depth to me—the most interesting character actually ended up being Ji-soo because of her decision to die with her grandparents. We get hints of An-na’s past here and there, but I never personally connected with her as a character.

I don’t think this is a must-watch movie, but I think if you’re interested in it then you should give it a chance. It definitely might be someone else’s cup of tea, but it wasn’t mine. And that’s fine at the end of the day!

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