The title evokes the promise of a disaster film, one in which catastrophes—natural or man-made—strike with force to test human resilience under extreme conditions. The poster, meanwhile, carries the aura of satirical films centered on one of Korea’s most emblematic residential forms: the apartment block, long deployed as a metaphor for Korean society itself. The Great Flood, the new Netflix film that ranked among the top ten non-English titles in some seventy countries, turns out to be neither a conventional disaster film nor a satire of apartment life. Instead, it is a science fiction narrative of cybernetics, in which the biological data of a woman becomes the foundation for an artificial intelligence system designed to imitate a human mother.

The gap between what the film appears to promise and what it ultimately delivers may lie at the heart of its negative reception. The first half, which loosely follows disaster-film conventions, gradually dissolves into a speculative technological imagination without sufficiently persuasive causal logic. Genre mixture, twists, and improvisation have often generated productive debates about cinematic innovation, yet what seems to trouble many viewers is not simply the film’s narrative tactics. Rather, it is the mother–son relationship at its center, which feels uncomfortably traditional—outmoded, even obsolete—within the film’s futuristic frame.

The film’s emotional core rests on An-na and her young son, Ja-in, who suffers from diabetes and requires regular insulin injections. When a great flood occurs—triggered by Antarctic ice melt following an asteroid impact—water begins to inundate the lower levels of their high-rise apartment, forcing An-na to flee upward with her child. Her devotion to Ja-in is absolute and immediate. He is an unruly but ordinary little boy whose medical condition demands constant care. As An-na realizes that the apartment courtyard has transformed into a violent expanse of water, and that what pours from the sky exceeds any familiar monsoon rain, her first action is to pack her son’s insulin kit. She does not even raise her voice when Ja-in makes a naïve request to swim.

An-na is single-minded in protecting her child at all costs. This maternal instinct—once sanctified as sacred but now often regarded as implausible—forms the backbone of the film. It persists through every hardship the disaster narrative imposes and every speculative scenario the science fiction framework imagines. Ja-in cries; An-na comforts him. Ja-in goes missing; An-na willingly descends into flooded levels to find him. When Ja-in falls into hypoglycemic shock, An-na feeds him sugar mixed with orange juice. As the film progresses, however, a crucial possibility emerges: that all of this may be a reenactment performed by an artificial intelligence system. This turn raises a compelling question—can AI learn human emotions such as maternal instinct, and if so, what kinds of data would be required to model such psychological traits?

The film appears to suggest that the AI mother must be trained on a prototype drawn from an older cinematic tradition, exemplified by Love Me Once Again (1968), in which a mother sacrifices everything for a son born out of wedlock. In doing so, The Great Flood anchors its futuristic imagination in a deeply conventional, even archaic, image of motherhood—one that may explain why its emotional logic feels increasingly out of sync with its technological aspirations.

Jung_E

The realization that the behavioral patterns of An-na and Ja-in in moments of crisis are a technological rendition—based on a typecast model of mother and son—significantly reduces the initial sense of annoyance. What first registers as frustration toward an ultra-devoted mother and a child fully immersed in the immediacy of childhood gradually shifts into a more inquisitive mode of viewing. The film opens a space to consider how a culturally respected notion of the mother–son bond might be replayed, displaced, or preserved in an age of technological advancement. This displacement allows the bond to be examined at a distance from the cultural conditions that originally produced it.

A more serious question then emerges: is this the model of humanity upon which future technology should be based? Are we comfortable with the prospect that an AI system derived from this form of motherhood might one day coexist with us? The figure of the AI robot is no longer confined to speculative imagination. According to a global automobile manufacturer, humanoid robots capable of performing human labor are expected to be deployed in car manufacturing plants as early as 2028. Robots are also increasingly discussed as potential caregivers for senior citizens with degenerative diseases and for children. As Korea enters a super-aging society alongside a shrinking working-age population, the question of who will care for those unable to manage everyday life can no longer be postponed. If—and perhaps when—robots become necessary to sustain a basic level of social decency, would we want a caregiver robot modeled on a maternal instinct like An-na’s, utterly devoted and blindly purpose-fulfilling?

The nature of the dataset used to train AI systems thus becomes a critical issue, especially as some existing models have already demonstrated gender bias and racial prejudice. These cases serve as warning signs that harmful values may be transmitted into the technological future if left unexamined. Few would dispute the principle that artificial intelligence should not inherit values proven to be insidious or damaging. Should this principle also apply to forms of motherhood that are now widely regarded as outmoded or implausible when embedded in caregiver robots? If the answer is no, the implication is unsettling: while we publicly denounce such motherhood as a cultural shackle binding women to an impossible ideal, we may still privately desire someone—or something—to exhibit that level of commitment to our needs.

Jung_E offers a revealing parallel. The film’s titular fighter robot is based on a dataset extracted from Yoon, a female mercenary with an exceptional combat record. After her death, a military technology corporation seeks to mass-produce war robots using her battle intelligence. Their effort appears successful until the prototype repeatedly fails to complete combat simulations. The failure is traced to the resurfacing of suppressed memories of Yoon’s young daughter lying on a hospital bed. Despite being irrelevant to combat efficiency, maternal instinct reemerges through data intended solely to reproduce tactical intelligence. The film thus suggests that motherhood persists even within highly specialized technological systems. This persistence can be read either as a backhanded tribute to motherhood that is supposedly obsolete, or as an implicit—and troubling—endorsement of reintroducing traditional maternal models into artificial beings.

Test of Our Time

The goal set for the AI model in the film is far grander than the creation of a care robot: it is the replacement of humanity after its extinction caused by the asteroid impact in Antarctica. The devoted mother and her child function as a simulation designed to perfect a future human prototype. The question becomes sharper when the experiment is no longer about engineering a helper, but about whether it is viable to base the next model of humanity on an implausibly idealized version of motherhood. The meaning of motherhood as an essential component of parenting is already undergoing significant change, shaped by evolving understandings of care, responsibility, and emotional labor. If the experiment with An-na succeeds and her AI successors repopulate the planet, the post-apocalyptic future imagined by The Great Flood would paradoxically require a return to an archaic model of motherhood.

The Great Flood does not speculate about a distant future but tests a present already underway. What remains unsettled is not whether machines can learn human emotions, but which emotions we choose to preserve and institutionalize through them. In this sense, the film’s reliance on an outmoded model of motherhood is less a narrative failure than a cultural symptom. Faced with instability, precarity, and demographic imbalance, the future imagined here turns backward, retrieving devotion, sacrifice, and endurance as stabilizing forces. The flood, then, is not only environmental or technological. It is ethical: a test of what values we allow to survive when adaptation becomes unavoidable.