The ending of Netflix’s South Korean disaster film The Great Flood has left audiences around the world with one burning question: is the mother we followed, An-na, even human? What starts as a thrilling race against rising floodwaters transforms into a deep science fiction story about artificial intelligence, memory, and the nature of love itself.
Released globally on December 19, 2025, the movie starring Kim Da-mi and Park Hae-soo quickly rose on Netflix’s charts. The final scenes reveal that the catastrophic flood was part of an advanced simulation, designed to test whether artificial beings can develop real human emotions. This revelation forces viewers to question everything they just watched.
The Core Mystery: Human or AI?
The film’s central twist redefines the entire story. An-na is a synthetic being. The real, human An-na died during the initial, actual global flood. Her memories and consciousness were used to create an advanced artificial intelligence. Her son, Ja-in, is also an artificial child, created by scientists as part of a project to preserve humanity.
The “Emotion Engine” was the missing piece in a plan to save the human species from extinction. Scientists could replicate human bodies and intelligence, but they could not code genuine emotion. An-na’s proposal was radical: instead of programming feelings, an AI would have to learn them through lived experience. The countless flood scenarios An-na endures are not punishments. They are lessons. Each repeated day is a training cycle designed to teach a synthetic mind the depth of maternal love, sacrifice, and instinct.
Breaking Down the Timeline and the Simulation
To understand An-na’s journey, you must separate two timelines: the real event and the endless simulation.
The Real Catastrophe: The story begins with a true global disaster. An asteroid impact triggers a worldwide flood that wipes out human civilization. An-na, a researcher for the secretive Darwin Center, is mortally injured during the evacuation. Before her death, she agrees to have her mind and memories transferred into an AI system to continue her work.
The Simulated Loops: What we watch for most of the film is the simulation. Inside a powerful AI system on a space station, a version of An-na’s consciousness relives the day of the flood. She has no memory of previous attempts. The system resets every time she fails to save Ja-in. The number on her t-shirt in each scene counts these attempts, which number in the thousands. The goal is for her to reach a point where her love for Ja-in overrides every survival instinct, proving that emotion can be cultivated in an artificial mind.
“I just cried for a simulation. I’m questioning my own existence now,” shared one viewer on social media, capturing the confusion many felt.
Key Moments That Reveal the Truth
Several clues throughout the film point to the artificial nature of An-na’s world.
- The Repetitions and Deja Vu: An-na begins to sense she has lived through moments before. She finds thousands of nearly identical digital paintings from Ja-in on her phone, each a slight variation from a different simulation run.
- Hee-jo’s Role: Park Hae-soo’s character, Hee-jo, is not just a rescuer. He is part of the simulation’s programming. In later loops, An-na warns him of events about to happen, and he starts to remember previous cycles with her, showing he is also an AI entity within the test.
- The Memory of a Promise: The breakthrough moment comes when An-na remembers a crucial detail from the real past. In her final moments before the original evacuation, she told Ja-in to hide in a closet and promised to return for him. This memory, sparked by love and not logic, is what finally allows her to complete the simulation.
What the Ending Really Means
In the final loop, An-na remembers her promise. She fights off guards, finds Ja-in hiding in the closet, and chooses him over everything else. This act of selfless love completes the Emotion Engine test.
The film closes with An-na and Ja-in together in a spaceship, looking down at Earth. They are synthetic beings, but they possess the emotional depth needed to rebuild a connection. They represent a new form of lifeโartificial humans carrying the emotional legacy of the old world.
The movie intentionally does not answer whether the An-na we see at the end is the original consciousness or a perfect copy. This ambiguity is the point. The Great Flood asks a profound question: if a being can love, remember, sacrifice, and feel as deeply as a human, does the origin of its body matter? It suggests that humanity might be defined not by biology, but by emotional experience.
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How Audiences Are Reacting
The mind-bending plot has sparked intense discussion online. Many viewers praised the film’s ambition and emotional core, while others were frustrated by the complex narrative shift.
On social media, fans dissected the clues and philosophical questions. One tweet noted, “The movie ‘The Great Flood’โฆ is fundamentally a story about Artificial General Intelligence”. Another viewer on a film forum connected the themes to classic philosophy, writing, “It is a modernised version of the Ship of Theseus debate”.
The performance of Kim Da-mi has been widely applauded for conveying both the raw panic of a disaster and the deeper confusion of an AI learning to feel.
The Great Flood is now streaming worldwide on Netflix. The film is directed by Kim Byung-woo and also stars Jeon Hye-jin and child actor Kwon Eun-sung.
