THE GREAT FLOOD (2025)

💧 “When the world drowns, hope must learn to swim.”
⭐ Starring: Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo, Kim Kyu-na
🎭 Genre: Sci-Fi • Thriller • Disaster • Drama
🎬 Directed by: Kim Byung-woo (The Terror Live)
📺 Studio: Netflix Original Film

🌊 Overview

From visionary director Kim Byung-woo, the mind behind The Terror Live, comes an unrelenting survival epic set in a future where the skies never clear and the sea has swallowed the earth.

The Great Flood (2025) redefines the disaster genre — trading spectacle for suffocating intimacy as it asks what humanity becomes when the world itself turns against it.

Equal parts sci-fi thriller and human drama, it follows the last survivors of a drowned civilization clinging to hope in a world where every breath feels borrowed.

⚡ Story

In the year 2043, after decades of climate failure and rising sea levels, the world ends not with fire — but with water.
A relentless deluge has submerged continents, leaving only fractured megacities and isolated towers that pierce the endless storm.

Beneath one of these towers, Han Ji-won (Kim Da-mi), a gifted biotechnologist, wakes to find her building half-submerged. With communication severed and evacuation impossible, she discovers a child (Kim Kyu-na) in her flooded apartment — unconscious but alive, with strange bio-resonance readings that suggest she might be more than human.

Outside, Sergeant Lee Hyun (Park Hae-soo) leads one of the last rescue units in Seoul’s ruins. Fighting exhaustion, collapsing infrastructure, and rising guilt, he defies orders to reach Ji-won — unaware that what she’s protecting could either save what’s left of humanity… or doom it.

As the floodwaters rise, both will face impossible choices between duty and survival, faith and science — and what it means to keep hope afloat when the world has already sunk.

💀 Themes

Survival vs. Sacrifice
When saving one life could cost thousands, what does “doing the right thing” mean?

Science vs. Faith
The flood isn’t only a natural disaster — it’s a reckoning. Some see punishment, others evolution.

Hope as Rebellion
Even as the world drowns, humanity’s most defiant act is refusing to give up.

Climate Reckoning
At its core, The Great Flood is a haunting allegory for the consequences of inaction — a mirror held to a world already half-submerged in denial.

🌧️ Tone & Style

Kim Byung-woo’s direction blends claustrophobic tension with large-scale spectacle. Every drop of water becomes a weapon; every sound, a warning.

Visually, the film embraces a palette of cold blues and steel grays, punctuated by neon emergency lights flickering through the dark — a drowning world rendered with stark, poetic realism.

Expect:

• Long tracking shots through submerged hallways and tilted high-rises.

• Practical effects and miniature flooding blended with cutting-edge VFX.

• Quiet, meditative moments of grief amidst roaring chaos.

The cinematography evokes the suffocating isolation of Gravity and the haunting melancholy of Children of Men — where every image feels both apocalyptic and beautiful.

🔊 Sound & Score

Composed by Mowg (I Saw the Devil, Burning), the score mixes choral lamentations with ambient industrial sounds — merging human emotion with mechanical collapse.
Rain becomes rhythm, thunder becomes heartbeat.
Every crescendo feels like the world gasping for air.

🌍 Performances

Kim Da-mi anchors the film with a career-defining performance — fierce, fragile, and fearless.
Park Hae-soo delivers stoic empathy as a soldier who’s lost everything except his duty.
And young Kim Kyu-na embodies haunting innocence — the fragile embodiment of a new beginning in a world that no longer deserves one.

🧠 Symbolism

• The Child: A living metaphor for rebirth and evolution — humanity’s final mutation to survive its own sins.

• Water: Both destroyer and purifier, reflecting the duality of nature’s justice.

• The Tower: A modern Noah’s Ark turned prison — salvation built on privilege and desperation.

💥 Horror in Stillness

Unlike traditional disaster films, The Great Flood finds terror not in explosions but in silence — in the creak of water pressure against a steel wall, in a radio that crackles with one last voice, in a heartbeat muffled beneath water.
The flood isn’t just outside — it’s inside, in every moment of suffocating helplessness.

⭐ Critical Outlook

★★★★★ (9.0 / 10)
“A visceral, breathtaking fight for survival — and for the soul of humanity.”
— Screen Daily

“Tense, haunting, and heartbreakingly human. The Great Flood is the next evolution of the disaster genre.”
— Variety Asia

🔥 Taglines

💧 “When the world drowns, hope must learn to swim.”
💧 “The flood cleanses everything — even mercy.”
💧 “Survival is only the beginning.”

🎬 Final Thoughts

The Great Flood (2025) is more than a disaster film — it’s a requiem for the world we’re losing, and a prayer for the one that might rise after.
Director Kim Byung-woo crafts a story that is as intimate as it is epic, balancing human emotion with environmental horror in a cinematic experience both terrifying and transcendent.

In a future drowned by consequence, one truth remains:

🌊 The water takes everything — except the will to survive.

📅 Premieres November 2025 | Netflix Original Film
🎥 Directed by Kim Byung-woo
🎭 Starring Kim Da-mi • Park Hae-soo • Kim Kyu-na
🎵 Music by Mowg
💧 A Netflix Original Sci-Fi Thriller Event