The Great Flood Review – Korean apocalypse movie veers into sinister sci-fi territory | film

yourDirector Im Byung-woo’s imaginative but uninteresting sixth film begins like a standard end-of-the-world movie, with a flood inundating Seoul. He then tries to bear the burdens of social classes while a beleaguered mother tries to climb the 30-story apartment building to escape rising floodwaters. But once it’s revealed that An Na (Kim Da Mi) is a second-rate science officer for an indispensable research project, the film becomes a whole different beast — perhaps something entirely malevolent.

As filming begins, Ja In (Kwon Eun Seung), An Na’s swim-obsessed six-year-old son, sees his dreams come true when water begins to flood their apartment. Along with everyone else, they start bombing the stairs – before company security officer Hee-joo (Park Hye-soo) catches up with them and explains that an asteroid impact in Antarctica is causing catastrophic rains that will wipe out civilization. But a helicopter is on its way to evacuate her and Ja In, as she is one of the leading minds who was working in a secret UN laboratory that holds the key to humanity’s future.

Climbing to the surface – and then continuing to ascend – changes how we view everything, as the precise blueprint for her work is revealed and the film descends down a virtual rabbit hole. With this sci-fi skew, it’s clear that Kim has imbibed heavily on Edge of Tomorrow, Charlie Kaufman’s Mental Labyrinths, and perhaps also — with its massive tsunami gathering on the horizon and its apocalyptic maudlin tone — Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

But Kim’s recurring narrative doesn’t prepare us for the future of humanity so much as it is — in keeping with the Netflix original’s identity — the future of entertainment. As An Na “corrects” her initially selfish reactions to the people she encounters—a girl trapped in an elevator, a woman in labor—the suggestion is that emotional responses to these recurring dramas can be calibrated in some way. It looks like an apology, complete with cut-and-pasted disaster photos, for algorithmic entertainment. The often shaky storytelling, especially the failure to identify a useful antagonist, suggests that human fallibility is still alive and well. Or perhaps this reluctance to condemn our ideal future means that Kim is already complicit to the nth degree.