The Great Flood review – Korean apocalypse film strays into sinister sci-fi territory | Movie

KIm Byung-woo’s quixotic but not unpleasant sixth feature begins like a normal apocalypse film, with a flood flooding Seoul. Then it flirts with the baggage of social stratification as a beleaguered mother attempts to climb her 30-story apartment building to escape rising floodwaters. But once it’s revealed that An-na (Kim Da-mi) is a second-rank science officer tasked with a much-needed research project, the film becomes a completely different beast — perhaps something quite insidious.

As the film begins, An-na’s six-year-old swimming-obsessed son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) sees his dreams come true when water begins to flood their apartment. Along with everyone else, they start pounding the stairs – before company security guard Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) catches up with them and explains that an asteroid impact in Antarctica is causing catastrophic rains that will end civilization. But a helicopter is on its way to evacuate her and Ja-in, because she is one of the pioneering minds who worked in a secret UN laboratory that holds the key to humanity’s future.

Hitting the roof – then continuing higher – changes how we look at everything, as the exact pattern of his work is revealed and the film goes down a virtual rabbit hole. Deviating from science fiction, Kim has clearly imbibed heavily from Edge of Tomorrow, Charlie Kaufman’s mental mazes and perhaps also – with mega-tsunamis gathering on the horizon and the presiding maudlin-apocalyptic tone – Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

But Kim’s recursive narrative doesn’t so much prepare us for the future of humanity as it does for — per her Netflix Original identity — the future of entertainment. As An-Na “corrects” her initially selfish reactions to the people she encounters – a girl stuck in an elevator, a woman in labor – the suggestion is that the emotional responses to this looping drama can be somehow calibrated. It seems like an apologia, complete with copy-and-pasted disaster footage, for algorithmic entertainment. The often shaky storytelling, particularly the inability to point to a useful antagonist, suggests, however, that human fallibility is alive and well. Or maybe this reluctance to condemn our optimized future means Kim is already complicit to the nth degree.