Becoming The Muse

The Great Flood Movie Review

The Great Flood (Korean Title: 대홍수) is a 2025 South Korean science fiction disaster film which premiered at the 30th Busan International Film Festival on the 18th of September 2025. It was released for global streaming on Netflix on 19 December 2025.

The movie follows a mother and her young son racing against the clock to escape a flooding high-rise building, for a mission that could possibly be humanity’s last hope…

The Good

What better way to end the year then the traditional end-of-year disaster movie which reminds us all we have is each other, to make each moment count and that we don’t have a planet B…

It’s a tense movie, whose urgency-filled atmosphere begins when a mother is woken up by a child exclaiming that… “there’s a swimming pool outside.” But this isn’t a mild inconvenience, its a tsunami-scale flood and the rising waters are apocalyptical and rendered in captivating visuals on the Seoul backdrop of highrise buildings…

Kim Da-mi anchors the film with a powerful, emotionally grounded performance as An-na, a scientist and mother driven by the primal need to protect her son. Her emotional range keeps you invested, even when the film begins to spiral away from familiar disaster-movie territory into something far more complex and cerebral.

I was pleasantly surprised to spot Park Hae-soo from Squid Game Season 1 playing Son Hee-jo… a no-nonsense bodyguard with a cynical view on humanity… Given what he endured in Squid Game, his scepticism feels oddly earned.

The Bad

How long can a person realistically hold their breath underwater during a flood? Apparently, long enough for the film to over-complicate itself and twist its own plot into knots.

The movie begins like an ordinary disaster film with clear stakes, rising water, ticking clock but then it reboots into something else entirely, a puzzle that you might not completely solve even after getting to the end. The sense of bewilderment hasn’t been this strong since Inception or Tenet.

It’s as if they tried to superglue two movies together with water and philosophy and the result makes for an ambitious premise, though creative doesn’t quite gel.

Park Hae-soo’s character is underwritten, utilised as a plot device for exposition than actually doing hero stuff. And yes, the little boy can be rather annoying at times, though to be fair, children do that.

The Ugly

The Great Flood raises logical and conceptual questions that no matter how attentive you watch it, you will struggle to answer… and the payoff doesn’t justify the narrative complexity…

It can feel claustrophobic and repetitive, and if you watch it while its raining heavily outside with flood warnings, you might have some pretty trippy dreams…

Final Thoughts

The Great Flood is a bold take on the disaster movie genre that falters in its convoluted narrative but delivers a tense, emotional and visually charged production.

Do you watch disaster movies or is there enough going on in the world without adding apocalyptic worries….