The Great Flood Gives The Survival Thriller An Ingenious Sci-Fi Spin
“I want to see what you do in the end.”
Survival movies will be around as long as movies survive. From the Perils of Pauline silent movie serials to 2024’s Twisters, watching people fight for their lives in the face of a world set against them is a surefire way to get an audience interested. However, after a certain point, these movies can get repetitive, especially when it's clear the hero is going to survive.
But what if the hero didn’t?
That’s the groundbreaking twist in The Great Flood, Netflix’s Korean survival thriller that adds a sci-fi element to the classic climate allegory story — one that will keep you guessing until the very last minute.
The Great Flood follows Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi) as she wakes up to her third-floor apartment being flooded. She tries to pack up things for her and her son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) to evacuate, but soon she gets a call from Son Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) who explains why that won’t be possible: Meteors have melted the polar ice caps, so now her work in AI and emotion replication is essential to the future of humanity. And with her mentor swept away, everything relies on her.
But in order to help, she has to get to the rooftop, and while she does that, she has to keep Ja-in safe not only from the never-ending onslaught of waves but also from the truth regarding his nature. At first, it looks like An-na is just going to head off to save the world and leave her son behind, but only 40 minutes of the full runtime have passed.
It’s then that The Great Flood reveals its true nature. We watch An-na wake up the morning of the flood over and over again, and each time she tries and fails to leave with Ja-in... who we learn isn’t her son at all. In fact, he’s one of her experiments to replicate the human condition using AI, and these simulations of the flood are each a test to see if the “emotion engine” could replicate the devotion a mother has to her child.
The Great Flood slowly reveals a simulaion time loop An-na must escape.
This is the perfect survival movie for someone like me who gets stressed out if the stakes are too dire. With the replication of each cycle, An-na forgets what happened previously, but through thousands of repetitions (labeled by numbers on the T-shirt she wears), she slowly pieces together what’s happening and decides no matter what, she will escape with her son.
So not only is this a thriller, an apocalypse movie, and a sci-fi movie, it’s also a time loop movie. Through genuinely great CGI, we often see that the rooms outside An-na’s apartment are just made of gold digital dust, and as she tries again and again, we see flashbacks to just how her past research holds the key not only to her own survival but the survival of the human race itself.
It may be a late entry, but this could be the most surprising movie of 2025 — think Edge of Tomorrow meets Don’t Look Up meets The Poseidon Adventure, but with tons of hidden moments still waiting to be discovered.
