Kim Byung-woo’s The Nice Flood (대홍수), now streaming on Netflix, begins as a pulse-pounding catastrophe thriller: a catastrophic deluge engulfs Seoul, trapping a determined mom and her younger son in a towering residence block as waters rise relentlessly.
But this chimeric sixth function from the director of The Terror Dwell Quickly veers sharply into darker, extra conceptual sci-fi waters, remodeling what appears like an easy survival epic right into a mind-bending meditation on motherhood, synthetic intelligence, and the way forward for humanity.
On the heart is An-na (Kim Da-mi), a widowed AI researcher whose day begins together with her six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) gleefully saying that “there is a swimming pool outdoors”. The kid’s harmless pleasure rapidly turns to terror as seawater floods their third-floor dwelling, forcing An-na to steer him upward by means of chaos: panicked neighbors, collapsing stairwells, and big tsunamis crashing towards the constructing. When a mysterious operative, Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo), arrives to extract her, the stakes escalate additional – she isn’t just any survivor, however a key determine in a secret UN-backed mission to protect humanity after an asteroid-triggered international extinction occasion.
The early sequences ship visceral thrills, with spectacular VFX rendering the rising flood as an unstoppable pressure. Kim Da-mi anchors the emotional core, her efficiency conveying a mom’s uncooked intuition amid mounting dread. The claustrophobic high-rise setting echoes basic catastrophe movies like *The Poseidon Journey*, whereas the relentless upward climb builds real suspense.
However as An-na reaches increased flooring, the narrative takes a sinister flip. Flashbacks and glitches reveal that the flood isn’t any singular disaster – it’s a repeated simulation, run 1000’s of occasions (over 21,000 iterations, as refined on-screen numbers trace) to coach an AI “emotion engine” able to replicating real human emotions, notably maternal love. Ja-in shouldn’t be her organic son however an artificial youngster engineered for the experiment, and An-na herself turns into the take a look at topic, reliving the trauma in loops till she prioritizes her youngster over survival protocols. The movie’s last act shifts from bodily peril to metaphysical horror: the deluge turns into a digital assemble, and the “rescue” a calibration of code.
This swerve is bold, mixing high-stakes motion with philosophical questions on emotion, reminiscence, and what it means to be human. But the storytelling feels brittle – the transition from grounded catastrophe to summary sci-fi is abrupt, leaving some threads underdeveloped and the pacing uneven. The recursive loops, whereas intelligent, can really feel repetitive, and the heavy reliance on visible results often overshadows character depth.
Nonetheless, there may be enjoyment available from this story of a mom and youngster preventing towards inconceivable odds. Kim Da-mi’s dedicated efficiency sells the emotional stakes, even because the movie spirals into extra sinister territory, and the visible spectacle – towering waves, submerged cityscapes, pixelated simulations – stays a technical triumph.
The Nice Flood is a daring, if uneven, experiment that rewards viewers prepared to experience its wild style shifts. It will not be totally coherent, however in its finest moments it captures the primal terror of a world drowning – and the quiet energy of affection that refuses to let go.
