"The Great Flood" by Kim Byung-woo is a complete misfire The film had the potential to be an entertaining disaster movie, but it failed

The Great Flood: plot and cast

The Great Flood, the new Korean Netflix original film written and directed by Kim Byung-woo, starts from a strong premise that ends up burning itself out within the first forty minutes. The story echoes that of Moses, but without the Ark or the animals. A sudden downpour hits the Earth, ready to wipe out the human species. An-Na (Kim Da-mi) is alone on the third floor; with her is her son Ja-In (Kwon Eun-sung).

When their apartment begins to flood, with water that has already swallowed up the streets of Seoul and shows no sign of stopping, the woman takes the child with her and starts climbing the stairs to reach the thirtieth floor. Of course, she is not the only tenant trying to save her own life and that of her loved ones. For An-Na, a race against time and the elements begins, until the film decides to take a series of unexpected turns.

Netflix’s disaster movie formula

To begin with, it’s worth noting that Netflix loves to trap its protagonists inside buildings. Back in 2025, one of the most-watched titles of the summer was the German thriller Brick, in which the characters were confined to their homes by a mysterious entity that sealed their building, forcing them to come up with a way to escape.

This formula of moving up and down floors was something the platform had already explored with The Platform in 2019, this time not a streamer original but a Spanish title acquired for international distribution, which once again repeated the dynamic of a vertical prison, quite literally.

The vertical structure does, in fact, help convey a sense of constant obstacle-overcoming, which is exactly what The Great Flood aims to deliver. It feels a bit like being inside a video game, where each landing represents a challenge to overcome, with moments where, if you lose a life, you still have a few in reserve, while in others, you are immediately met with game over.

The limits of Kim Byung-woo’s new film

But what happens with Kim Byung-woo’s film? The work contains another work within it, which in turn is made up of further small traps and overly complicated narrative devices that weigh down what could have been, perhaps even more effectively, a conventional yet solid disaster movie.

Instead, the film attempts to reflect on the end of the human race and, at least in theory, on how it might return, creating nothing but confusion in a screenplay that is forced to submit to numerous contrivances, most of them unsuccessful, leaving one to wonder how it could even be imagined that the viewer might feel engaged by such a convoluted story.

What doesn’t help is the overly serious tone of the soundtrack, reminiscent of the music from Arrival, which itself was a sci-fi film dealing with the implications and pains of a particular kind of motherhood. Not to mention an uneven pacing that, in the final stretch, the writing of The Great Flood seems to give in to, floundering as it tries to tie together its narrative threads and make sense of the story, where what must survive (since it’s not only a disaster movie but also a survival movie) is not just the characters, but the film’s own coherence. A misfire for the Korean Netflix production. A game that gets lost among the soaked, philosophical, sci-fi and human corridors travelled by the protagonist and her son.