‘The Great Flood’ Netflix Review: Stream It or Skip It?
- By Izay Ayesha -
- Jan 10, 2026
Kim Byung-woo’s The Great Flood (대홍수), now streaming on Netflix, begins as a pulse-pounding disaster thriller: a catastrophic deluge engulfs Seoul, trapping a desperate mother and her young son in a towering apartment block as waters rise relentlessly.
Yet this chimeric sixth feature from the director of The Terror Live soon veers sharply into darker, more conceptual sci-fi waters, transforming what feels like a straightforward survival epic into a mind-bending meditation on motherhood, artificial intelligence, and the future of humanity.
At the centre is An-na (Kim Da-mi), a widowed AI researcher whose day starts with her six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) gleefully announcing that “there’s a swimming pool outside”. The child’s innocent excitement quickly turns to terror as seawater floods their third-floor home, forcing An-na to lead him upward through chaos: panicked neighbours, collapsing stairwells, and massive tsunamis crashing against the building. When a mysterious operative, Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo), arrives to extract her, the stakes escalate further – she is not just any survivor, but a key figure in a secret UN-backed project to preserve humanity after an asteroid-triggered global extinction event.
The early sequences deliver visceral thrills, with impressive VFX rendering the rising flood as an unstoppable force. Kim Da-mi anchors the emotional core, her performance conveying a mother’s raw instinct amid mounting dread. The claustrophobic high-rise setting echoes classic disaster films like *The Poseidon Adventure*, while the relentless upward climb builds genuine suspense.
But as An-na reaches higher floors, the narrative takes a sinister turn. Flashbacks and glitches reveal that the flood is no singular catastrophe – it is a repeated simulation, run thousands of times (over 21,000 iterations, as subtle on-screen numbers hint) to train an AI “emotion engine” capable of replicating genuine human feelings, particularly maternal love. Ja-in is not her biological son but a synthetic child engineered for the experiment, and An-na herself becomes the test subject, reliving the trauma in loops until she prioritises her child over survival protocols. The film’s final act shifts from physical peril to metaphysical horror: the deluge becomes a digital construct, and the “rescue” a calibration of code.
This swerve is ambitious, blending high-stakes action with philosophical questions about emotion, memory, and what it means to be human. Yet the storytelling feels brittle – the transition from grounded disaster to abstract sci-fi is abrupt, leaving some threads underdeveloped and the pacing uneven. The recursive loops, while clever, can feel repetitive, and the heavy reliance on visual effects occasionally overshadows character depth.
Still, there is enjoyment to be had from this story of a mother and child fighting against impossible odds. Kim Da-mi’s committed performance sells the emotional stakes, even as the film spirals into more sinister territory, and the visual spectacle – towering waves, submerged cityscapes, pixelated simulations – remains a technical triumph.
The Great Flood is a bold, if uneven, experiment that rewards viewers willing to ride its wild genre shifts. It may not fully cohere, but in its best moments it captures the primal terror of a world drowning – and the quiet power of love that refuses to let go.