Review | Busan 2025: The Great Flood movie review – Kim Da-mi can’t save puzzling Netflix fantasy

Kim Da-mi stars in what begins as a disaster movie then spins off into science fiction, a move that will surely leave viewers floundering

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Kim Da-mi as AI developer An-na and Kwon Eun-seong as her son Ja-in in a still from the Netflix’s new Korean movie The Great Flood. Photo: Netflix

Published: 4:15pm, 22 Sep 2025

2/5 stars

Drowning in ambition but narratively adrift, Kim Byung-woo’s latest high-concept blockbuster opens with an apartment complex being consumed by a giant tsunami before morphing into a science-fiction thriller that defies simple explanation.

Kim’s filmography boasts a string of audacious genre-bending experiments, from The Terror Live to Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy. The Great Flood, which premiered last week at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, is an action-packed puzzle box that continues in a similar vein.

Kim Da-mi plays An-na, an AI developer and single mother who wakes to discover that Seoul is being bombarded by unprecedented rainfall and flooding, with the water level already reaching her second-floor flat.

Just as she and her six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) are being evacuated to a higher floor, a giant wave crashes into the building, sending them and their escape plan into chaos.

During its opening movement, The Great Flood is breathlessly tense, boasting impressive digital effects and a palpable sense of danger.

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