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By Melissa Fleur Afshar
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Netflix’s latest Korean blockbuster The Great Flood has surged to the top of the platform’s global charts for nonglobal films, but audiences are divided over its cryptic ending and philosophical twist.
The 2025 science-fiction disaster film, directed by Kim Byung-woo and starring Kim Da-mi and Park Hae-soo, blends apocalyptic spectacle with more thoughtful looks at motherhood, memory and AI.
The movie, which debuted worldwide on Netflix on December 19 following its festival run, quickly became the streamer’s most-watched non-English film globally, overtaking The Grinch and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on the platform’s Top 10 chart.
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Yet, despite its success with viewers, critics have been far less enthusiastic: the film holds a 47 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviews describing it as ambitious, with shocking twists, yet slightly uneven.
The Ending Explained
Set in the final hours before a catastrophic deluge wipes out civilization, The Great Flood follows An-na, a mother desperately searching for her son, Ja-in, as rising waters consume their apartment tower. What begins as a claustrophobic survival drama soon unfolds into a larger mystery about consciousness and technology.
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In the movie’s climactic revelation, viewers learn that the story’s events are not happening in a single reality but across thousands of simulations. In the original, "real" timeline, An-na is mortally wounded during the flood and later rescued by another spacecraft.
Before dying, she requests that her mind be uploaded into a computer system designed to create artificial humans. The simulations that follow—repeated re-creations of her final hour—are part of a test to replicate the emotional bond between the mother and her child.
Within these simulations, An-na and Ja-in are deliberately separated, forcing her to experience the anguish of searching for him over and over again. Each failure refines the AI’s understanding of human emotion. Only after thousands of cycles does An-na finally succeed in saving her son, completing the emotional engine test and enabling the system to build new, artificial bodies for both of them.
The final scene shows the AI versions of An-na and Ja-in together, headed for a new life.
The structure is intentionally disorienting, and many viewers have turned online to decode its layered timelines.
As one interpretation puts it, An-na’s endless repetitions serve as both her punishment and her salvation—each loop teaching her what it means to be human, even after death. Others pointed out the messages the film makes about AI and how its fast evolution has led to it being used in daily life.
While The Great Flood may not have won over every critic, its mix of disaster spectacle and existential reflection has clearly found an audience.
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