“My mom’s house turned into a swimming pool.”
Netflix’s film The Great Flood begins with this single line from the son, Jain, which soon marks the start of an apocalyptic deluge.
This film was directed by Kim Byung-woo, recently known as the director of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint and husband of T-ara’s Ham Eun-jung. Although some of his previous works didn’t fully meet high expectations, this time he returns with something truly unique — a “memory-warp” story that replaces time travel with shared memories. Combined with intense performances from Kim Da-mi and Park Hae-soo, The Great Flood invites a wide range of interpretations.
If you remember Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow, where the protagonist struggles to change a repeating timeline, this film follows a similar structure — but instead of time loops, the characters share memories through artificial intelligence. Depending on how much you understand the setup, The Great Flood can feel like either a masterpiece or a confusing mess.
The story begins with two experimental subjects — one sharing the memories of a mother, Goo Anna, and the other sharing the memories of her son, Jain — who live within a simulated, Matrix-like world. Facing an impending apocalypse brought by a global flood, a project called Isabella App is launched to create a new humanity.
In this virtual world, both Anna and Jain exist as AI subjects within the Isabella system, and Anna is assigned a mission — to find her son. By the end, the “experimental” Anna acquires a mother’s genuine emotions, signaling the birth of a new human race.
In short, the real Goo Anna appears only once — during a space accident in which she dies. Everything else in the movie happens within a Matrix-like simulation. Once you understand this, The Great Flood feels like one of the most refreshingly original Korean Netflix films in years.
Let’s slowly go over the story and ending interpretation step by step.
(Interestingly, the seemingly frustrating son turns out to be the perfect helper. If you look closely, Anna’s T-shirt number changes throughout the movie — each number signifies a repeated simulation. It’s a brilliant concept that only observant viewers will catch!)
Table of Contents
The Great Flood Cast and Characters
Real Goo Anna (Kim Da-mi)
(English dub: Francesca Carlow / Japanese dub: Matsumoto Sara)
A senior researcher at Darwin Center’s Emotion Engine Development Team 3 under the UN, living in Apartment #303. She dies in an accident in outer space.
Experimental Subject Anna (Kim Da-mi; dual role)
The movie’s main character, struggling to survive a massive flood within the simulated world.
Son Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo)
(English dub: Stephen Poo / Japanese dub: Nakagawa Keiichi)
A member of the Inforce Security Team 1, tasked with rescuing Anna amid the global flood. As a child, he was abandoned by his mother, leaving him with trauma and a pessimistic view of humanity. He, too, is an experimental subject.
Shin Jain (Kwon Eun-sung)
(English dub: Damon Fung / Japanese dub: Kumagai Mirei)
A boy created by the Emotion Engine as an experimental subject named “Newman-77.”
Real son, Shin Jain: Appears only in flashback scenes.
Other supporting characters:
- Lee Ji-soo (Yuna) (English dub: Erin Choi)
- Anna’s Mother (Park Mi-hyun)
- Thug #1 (Kim Dong-young)
- Thug #2 (Kang Bin)
- Pregnant Wife in Apt. #1503 (Eun-su)
- Husband in Apt. #1503 (Ahn Hyun-ho)
- Security Team Leader (Lee Joon-hyuk)
- Children from Apt. #304 (Jung Min-jun, Kim Gyu-na)
- Lim Hyun-mo (Jeon Hye-jin) (special appearance; English dub: Jolin Kim)
Anna’s supervisor and chief researcher. - Lee Hwi-so (Park Byung-eun) (special appearance; English dub: Corey Lee)
Director of the Isabella Lab. - Shin Ga-won (Lee Hak-joo) (special appearance)
Netflix film The Great Flood Plot Summary
The movie begins with experimental subject Anna, who carries the memories of the real Goo Anna (Kim Da-mi), experiencing an apocalyptic great flood.
One day, in the Matrix-like world, “Goo Anna” suddenly finds herself in a torrential downpour as a gigantic tidal wave approaches.
(If you look closely, the son, who is a completed experimental subject, already knows what he is supposed to do, while experimental subject Anna is flustered and clumsy.)
Anna (the experimental subject) is an AI development researcher who lives on the third floor with her son “Shin Jain” (also an experimental subject, played by Kwon Eun-sung).
“Mom, our house turned into a swimming pool.”
Woken by her son’s voice, she is shocked to see that a great flood is bearing down on them and the water has already risen to the third floor where they live.
Panicking and scrambling to pack their things, Anna suddenly receives a phone call from Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo), who urges her to get out immediately, and they quickly flee the apartment.
Anna and her son Jain carry the painful memory of losing Jain’s father in a car accident that plunged into water several years earlier.
Because of this, experimental subject Jain has behaved oddly since childhood: he attends swimming lessons and always carries goggles around with him.
Residents all rush to evacuate to the rooftop, turning the stairwell into a chaotic jam, when “Son Hee-jo” (Park Hae-soo), who has come specifically to find Anna, appears.
Hee-jo, a member of a security task force dispatched solely to rescue Anna, arrives at the apartment alone, bravely pushing through the disaster.
(The water engulfing the characters looks suspiciously clean, which is a bit of a hole in the logic. Still, since it is a world built from the real Anna’s memories, it is not entirely impossible.)
Experimental subject Jain suffers from hypoglycemia, and although Anna unconsciously manages to pack his medication, she loses it to the water.
They barely escape with their lives, but Jain collapses from hypoglycemic shock, forcing Anna to break into an elderly man’s apartment, where she saves her son by mixing sugar into orange juice.
Just before heading to the rooftop, Jain suddenly complains that he urgently needs to go to the bathroom, which frustrates Anna to no end.
(In fact, this is the only way for the five-year-old mind, armed with memories of failed escapes, to stop his mother from repeating the same failures.)
On their way out, they encounter Lee Ji-soo (Yuna), who is searching for her grandfather, as well as a heavily pregnant woman, but Anna, in her panic, passes them by.
They finally reach the rooftop just in time for the rescue helicopter to arrive, but the team immediately begins to extract the Emotion Engine from Jain’s brain.
Anna, who originally designed the project, can do nothing but watch as the operatives kill her son, and Hee-jo, who came to save her, is also executed on the spot, shot without mercy.
In reality, Anna was an experimental subject on a mission: as a mother, she had to find her son Jain in order to develop genuine maternal feelings. Having failed, she is sent to space.
The protagonist then happens to board a spacecraft heading toward a provisional orbital research facility, but a previous ship is struck by debris and explodes, causing her memories to warp back to the beginning again.
The number “491” printed on her T-shirt hints that this is the 491st iteration of the experiment.
Just like Edge of Tomorrow, each failed loop allows the experimental subject to gradually awaken as a mother by applying the lessons learned from previous failures.
The hypoglycemia medication, the orange juice packed with sugar, and so on.
Yet Jain disappears again.
Now aware that the same situation is repeating, Anna successfully saves Ji-soo, the girl searching for her grandfather, during one of the loops.
She fails because of thugs on the 4,006th attempt, but on the 4,007th try, she survives with the help of Ji-soo and Hee-jo.
With Ji-soo’s help, she manages to fight back against the thugs as well.
However, Anna still cannot find Jain anywhere, until she suddenly remembers a drawing he made. She opens her phone and checks the picture.
She realizes that the experiment has repeated 21,499 times.
Seeing the countless drawings Jain has made over thousands of iterations finally triggers the recovery of her own memories, and just before she is forcibly dragged away by the operatives, she manages to tell Hee-jo the truth.
“You can’t get on the helicopter. You die on the rooftop.”
Hearing this, Hee-jo realizes that his true mission is not simply to escort Anna to the rooftop, but to save her, and he fights with the other team members.
The Great Flood Ending
Outnumbered and cornered, Hee-jo is about to be defeated when Anna manages to grab a gun and save him.
Now fully awakened, Anna teams up with Hee-jo to search for Jain.
“If he’s disappeared thousands of times, it means he’s been waiting for his mom to find him.”
However, the rooftop is swarming with operatives. While Hee-jo holds them off, Anna runs to the wardrobe to find Jain but is stopped just before she can reach it.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—at that exact moment, a massive wave engulfs the apartment building, plunging everyone into chaos and water. In the confusion, Anna and Hee-jo overpower the operatives and escape.
On the 21,499th experiment, she finally finds Jain asleep inside the rooftop wardrobe.
“No, she didn’t abandon you. Mom told you to wait.”
After feeding him the sugary juice and waking the experimental Jain inside the simulation, Anna finally understands real maternal love. She then fights off the operatives who come to capture her and tells Jain that they will meet again, instructing him to swim to a floating spot on the water while she sacrifices herself.
Satisfied, the AI resumes the program, watching the mother who jumped into a world turned into ocean for the sake of her child.
In truth, the original Anna, who was escaping Earth on a spaceship, requested just before her death that her own memories and her son’s memories be used in the Emotion Engine experiment she had developed.
Once the AI confirms that human emotion has evolved into a fully complete form, it creates synthetic humans and sends them from space to a newly stabilized Earth. This marks the ending of The Great Flood.
Netflix The Great Flood Post-credit Scene
There is one post-credit scene. It shows many small pod-like spacecraft modules being launched toward the stabilized Earth, then the scene cuts to black.
The Great Flood Ending Explained
The film concludes by showing that experimental subject Anna awakens as a true human mother, realizing that genuine motherhood is defined by the willingness to sacrifice oneself for one’s child—that is, emotion. It also reveals that, with only five years left until the great flood that will end humanity, her son Jain was turned into an Emotion Engine first.
Once Anna escapes the Matrix program, she returns to the flooded world and searches for Jain, just as in the final scene of the movie.
“Jain, want to dive with Mom? I’ll count to 30.”
A Hidden Interpretation Many Miss
Everything shown in the movie takes place within the Matrix world, and the real mission is neither to rescue Jain nor to find him; it is for Anna to break free of the Matrix program and awaken as a true mother. Because of this, every version of Jain in the movie already knows the outcome and, in his own five-year-old way, tries to hold his mother back.
As a result, he initially appears as an infuriating character: constantly disappearing, demanding to use the bathroom at the worst times, and driving viewers mad. In reality, all of this stems from the Anna inside the AI system unconsciously resisting her own escape. Only after 21,499 experiments does she finally realize that her role is not to save Jain, but to escape the Matrix and, like in the last scene, find him again and awaken true motherhood.
Thus, everything that happens in the film is a continuous series of harsh trials for Anna. The ending reveals that maternal love itself exists outside the Matrix—an “error zone” that the system cannot control. In other words, through Jain’s five-year-old memories, it awakens all of the real Anna’s memories and ends there.
Why The Great Flood Is Hard to Interpret
Within the movie, Anna’s memories are simply shown as repeating in a time-loop manner, which naturally throws viewers into confusion. Jain suddenly disappears, Ji-soo appears out of nowhere, he collapses from hypoglycemia, the pregnant woman shows up… Why?
(Every single element is designed to awaken the experimental subject, and if the security forces are the villains, Jain is actually the greatest helper in waking his mother up—this twist is the twist among twists.)
In truth, the film is never set in reality from the start. Everything operates as a mission built from Jain’s and Anna’s memories, designed to help her find maternal love. Because of that, viewers expecting a straightforward disaster film do not realize that the entire thing is simulated and naturally feel frustrated. Around the mid-point, they may finally grasp that it is some kind of “warp” or loop story, but that, too, is a red herring; the real truth lies elsewhere.
The movie only hints at this in the last few seconds, making it one of the most unkindly explained films in recent memory. The real Anna appears only once—in the scene of her death. Everything else is a simulation. The core idea is that over five years, in order to create a mother, the experiment relies on the memories of a real human child, Jain.
The whispering scene could be interpreted as the real mother, but it makes more sense to see it as an early experiment’s memory. The film already hints that true motherhood means never leaving one’s child behind; Jeon Hye-jin’s character is said to have “run away” because she could not leave her child. A true mother would not abandon her own child.
Just as Anna’s memories are repeated, Jain’s memories are also updated over 21,499 iterations, and one of those iterations becomes “Let’s meet again in the wardrobe.” This makes the most sense. That is why, at the very start of the movie, when he sees his mother attempting to leave, Jain hides in the wardrobe, and Anna finds him at once as if it were second nature. But in Jain’s memory, he is supposed to wait in the wardrobe for his mother, so he has not actually vanished; he has simply gone back into the wardrobe.
“Yesterday, and the yesterday before that… Why do I have to keep doing this?” – Jain’s iconic line, referencing the repeating experiments.
If you do not watch very carefully, you might miss it, but if you look closely, the number on Anna’s T-shirt changes—491, 1931, and so on. The first time we see Anna, she is wearing a plain white T-shirt, representing the very first experiment. Each time the experiment repeats, the numbers go up, until at last, on the 21,499th trial, she escapes the Matrix.
Are Anna and Jain Really Mother and Son?
The Emotion Project starts five years prior and begins with real human children. However, in the lab scenes, the father’s first words upon meeting Jain are, “So, you’re Jain,” as if he is meeting a child he has never seen before. This suggests that Jain is a child created from combined genetic material—sperm and egg—rather than from a traditional family setting.
Thus, several projects are launched. Lim Hyun-mo (Jeon Hye-jin) also raises a child as part of the experiment, but refuses to leave the child and disappears together with them. Real Anna, on the other hand, chooses to go into space for the sake of completing the experiment and ensuring humanity’s survival, but just before dying in an accident, she volunteers herself as an experimental subject because she realizes she wants to see Jain again.
What Happened to the Real Jain?
The data extraction scene implies he died. Later, when Park Byung-eun’s character explains the mission of the Isabella Lab, a segment shows the “find the child” mission being set up, alongside the announcement that this is the 491st trial. This suggests that even that scene might also be part of the mission.
If you miss this setup, you might mistakenly believe that the movie is showing the real Anna’s reality, but in truth, everything is part of the experiment.
Unlike the perfectly designed five-year-old Jain, all experimental Annas in the movie only share partial memories from the real Anna. Their mission is to discover maternal love through these repeated simulations. If you look closely at the ending, when she escapes with him, Jain’s head is shaved; however, when she meets him again after escaping the Matrix, his hair is long. This seems to be a device emphasizing that Anna could never truly leave her son behind.
Filming Locations of The Great Flood
- Bundang Memorial Park
- Songjiho Beach
- Norubyeol Red Cross Ecological Park
- ETRI Ainaeum Childcare Center
- RFsemi Co., Ltd.
- Apartment locations: Misa Riverside 17th Complex Apartments & Doryong SK View Apartments
The Great Flood Review
One-line review of Netflix’s The Great Flood:
“Director Kim Byung-woo’s unique talent for making films in ways that audiences fail to notice is on full display.”
If he had clearly indicated from the beginning that everything was part of an experiment, more viewers might have understood and appreciated the setup. Instead, the only hints that this is a warp experiment are the changing numbers on Anna’s T-shirt and a single scene showing Anna’s death in an accident. Because of this, many are left wondering what is real and what is fake, leading to harsh criticism. In the end, every disaster sequence in the film is fake—a simulation inside the Matrix.
By hiding the fact that it is an experiment and intentionally confusing audiences, the film disguises itself as a simple loop story. Using AI experimentation as its framework, it offers a rare type of warp narrative that critiques the age of AI. While it emphasizes human nature, the real Anna who dies in space arguably lacks that very humanity, which is a twist in itself.
Given how many general audiences failed to catch these layers, it may be time for the director to reflect on how to communicate complexity more clearly. Personally, the film’s intricate setup was so appealing that it made me want to revisit Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint as well. It has been a long time since a movie made it so clear why Netflix chose to invest in Kim Byung-woo. Still, one wonders how many viewers will actually watch a warp film while paying close enough attention to notice numbers on a T-shirt changing.
On a side note, apart from the fictional setup, some realism issues stand out: for instance, a corridor-style apartment building suddenly featuring cutting-edge architecture and an elevator in the interior. The production design could have used a bit more consistency.
The Great Flood
- Special effects: M83
- English title: 대홍수 영화 / Japanese: 大洪水
- Release date: December 19, 2025 (Netflix Original, simultaneous worldwide release)
- Running time: 109 minutes (1 hour 49 minutes)
- Rating: 15+ (TV-MA)
- Director/Writer: Kim Byung-woo
- Co-writer: Han Ji-su
- Production company: Fantasy Light Co., Ltd. (환상의 빛)
- Distributor/Streaming: Netflix
- Filming period: July 1, 2022 – January 5, 2023
- World premiere: September 18, 2025, at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, “Korean Cinema Today – Special Premiere” section
- Genres: Disaster, SF, Action, Drama, Thriller, Adventure, Dystopia, Eco-apocalypse, Time-loop
- Main cast: Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo, Jeon Hye-jin, etc.
- Producer: Kim Kyung-min
- Cinematography: Kim Tae-su / Lighting: Shin Kyung-man
- Art direction: Kim Byung-han, Choi Seul-gi / Stunts: Jung Yoon-heon, Noh Kyung-seop
- Costume: Choi Eui-young / Editing: Park Min-seon, Kim Chang-joo
- Music: Lee Joon-oh / Sound: Choi Tae-young
Black and White Chef: Culinary Class Wars Season 2 Chef list & instagram
- Netfilx Movie The Great Flood Ending Explained review (cast & location)
- BTS Jungkook & Aespa Winter dating rumors evidence: Matching bracelet, couple tattoo, and couple outfits
- Black and White Chef: Culinary Class Wars Season 2 Chef list & instagram
- The love story of Girls’ Generation’s Tiffany and Byun Yo han
- After 6 years Full change New Kia Seltos 2026 review (trim & price)
