The Great Flood on Netflix starts as a survival thriller but quickly reveals itself to be something much bigger. The story follows An-na, a scientist played by Kim Da-mi, as she tries to save her son, Ja-in, from a world-ending flood in their Seoul apartment building. The real surprise comes halfway through when viewers learn the flood is not real. It is a detailed simulation, and An-na is both its creator and its main test subject. This revelation changes everything about the story you just watched.
The Core Mission: Saving Humanity with AI
The flood is a result of an asteroid hitting Antarctica, melting ice sheets and causing global sea levels to rise catastrophically. An-na works for a research organization, called Isabela Labs or the Darwin Center in different sources, tasked with finding a way to preserve humanity. Their solution is not to save existing people, but to create new ones.
The organization has developed technology to create synthetic human children to repopulate Earth after an apocalypse. However, they faced a major problem: these synthetic beings lacked human emotions. An-na’s vital work was the Emotion Engine, an AI system designed to allow synthetic humans to feel genuine emotions like love, sacrifice, and compassion. For the plan to work, these synthetic children would need synthetic parents who could truly care for them. An-na volunteered her own memories and consciousness to train the first prototype of an AI mother.
In the film, An-na reveals her intention: “I will create a test simulation where the subject will go through different obstacles, searching for her child until she succeeds.”
The Reality Behind the Flood Simulation
To understand the simulation, you must know what happened in “reality” within the movie’s story. The first part of the film shows the actual great flood event. An-na and Ja-in, who is one of the first synthetic children, try to escape their flooding building with the help of a security agent, Son Hee-jo, played by Park Hae-soo.
Hee-jo’s mission is to save An-na because her scientific knowledge is irreplaceable for the humanity project. However, the rescue plan does not include saving Ja-in. On the rooftop, An-na is forcibly separated from Ja-in and taken to a helicopter. As she is pulled away, she promises him she will return. Later, while being transported to a space lab to continue her work, An-na’s ship is struck by a meteorite. Before this happened, she had already volunteered to have her memories extracted to serve as the core data for training the Emotion Engine.
How the Time Loop Simulation Works
The second half of the movie takes place inside the simulation created from An-na’s memories. The goal is to train an AI model of a mother. To do this, the AI “An-na” is placed in a repeated scenario based on her worst memory: the day of the great flood where she failed to save her son.
The simulation works like a time loop or a video game. Each time the AI An-na fails to find and save Ja-in, or dies in the attempt, the simulation resets to the morning of the flood. She starts again with no memory of her previous attempts, forcing the AI to learn from pure repetition and pattern recognition. The number seen on An-na’s t-shirt in different scenes is believed to represent which iteration of the loop she is currently in.
The simulation was designed without a set limit on the number of attempts. Because it ran for so many cycles—one source suggests over 21,000 iterations—it began to develop errors. These errors allowed the AI An-na to start retaining memories from past loops and even recall fragments from the original, real-world events. This memory glitch is what finally gives her the tools to break the cycle.
Breaking the Loop and Completing the Mission
As An-na begins to remember, she pieces together the truth. She realizes she is in a simulation and that her only way out is to successfully save Ja-in. She also understands that the other people in the building, including Agent Hee-jo, are part of the simulation and can be influenced.
In the final, successful iteration, a key memory returns: Ja-in’s habit of hiding in closets when scared. This memory is tied directly to her real-world promise to return for him. With Hee-jo’s help, she searches the building and finds Ja-in hiding in a closet on the rooftop.
Ja-in reminds her of the promise, saying, “I’ve been hiding in the cupboard because you promised you would come back for me.”
This moment—fulfilling a mother’s promise through sacrifice and determination—provides the critical emotional data needed to complete the Emotion Engine. By choosing to jump into the floodwaters after Ja-in instead of saving herself, the AI An-na demonstrates the ultimate maternal love and sacrifice. This act successfully concludes the training.
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The Ending: A New Beginning for Humanity
In the final scenes, the simulation destabilizes and ends. An-na and Ja-in are shown alive together on a spaceship that is heading toward Earth. They are not their original biological selves. Their consciousnesses, now perfected and rich with the emotional data from the simulation, have been transferred into new synthetic bodies.
The successful completion of An-na’s test means the Emotion Engine works. It can now be used to create more synthetic mothers and children to rebuild human civilization on Earth. The film ends on this note of cautious hope, with the mother and son reunited and ready to begin the work of repopulation.
The film The Great Flood is now available for streaming globally on Netflix.
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