Could the events of ‘The Great Flood’ be real? Netflix film’s chilling time-loop ending explained
At first glance, 'The Great Flood' may look like a familiar disaster film, with a mother desperately fleeing rising waters to protect her son. However, a closer look reveals a totally unexpected ending. For the unversed, the story follows Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi), tasked with saving her son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong), who is later revealed to be a synthetic human. Faced with an impossible choice, An-na makes a desperate plea and takes a drastic step, leaving viewers to question whether she is her original self or a synthetic being.
Amidst the chaos, it is revealed that An-na is an AI researcher at the UN-affiliated Darwin Center. She leads the creation of the Emotion Engine to give synthetic beings real emotions and also learns that advanced human-like bodies already exist but cannot be truly human without her work, prompting her assignment to complete the project in space. The revelation devastates her as it is revealed that Ja-in is actually Newman-77, a synthetic subject, and An-na must now create a "mother" capable of raising him with genuine emotions, as per Lifestyle Asia.
The story then moves to space, where An-na learns that meteor fragments will soon devastate Earth, leaving no time for traditional testing. She proposes a time-loop experiment, believing true emotions, especially maternal love, must be experienced rather than programmed. In the experiment, the synthetic mother repeatedly faces an apocalyptic world, restarting the loop each time she fails to reunite with the child, with humanity's survival depending on her eventual success.
An-na makes the ultimate sacrifice by volunteering as the experiment's subject, transferring her and Ja-in's memories into a simulation based on the worst day of her life, the flood. Trapped in a repeating loop, she relives the disaster over and over, searching for the child so the Emotion Engine can be created from genuine emotion. In the film's closing moments, An-na finally succeeds in finding Ja-in, bringing the time-loop experiment to an end and proving that genuine emotion can be born through lived experience.
With the experiment complete, 'The Great Flood' ends on a quiet, reflective note as An-na and Ja-in look down at Earth from space. However, the conclusion remains intentionally ambiguous, making viewers question the nature of An-na's existence, whether she is the original woman who regained her memories after the experiment or a newly created synthetic human, shaped by those same memories and emotions, much like Ja-in himself.
