The Great Flood - Is Ja-in a robot or a human? Explained

On Friday, December 19, Netflix's latest sci-fi South Korean film, The Great Flood, was released, starring Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo, and Kwan Eun-seong. The story revolves around a mother and a son who witness an approaching great flood that's expected to end humanity. As they try to escape the apartment complex to survive the great flood, the mother, An-na, is forced to leave her son, Ja-in, behind on Earth while she leaves for Isabela Labs to continue her research.

An-na is an AI researcher working at Isabela Labs who has been creating a solution in case of an apocalyptic emergency. They decide on building synthetic humans to repopulate the Earth after an apocalypse, and An-na plays a vital role in the same by creating an Emotion Engine that makes synthetic humans feel emotions experienced by real humans. One such synthetic human created by Isabela Labs is Ja-in, otherwise called NewMan77.

An-na is the human caretaker of the AI synthetic human. Therefore, no, Ja-in is not a robot but a synthetic human artificially created by Isabela Labs. The great flood urges the researchers to speed up their completion, and An-na is taken by Isabela Labs' representatives to complete her Emotion Engine for the synthetic humans. However, she dies when her spaceship is hit by a meteor. Regardless, before her death, she volunteered as a test subject for the Emotion Engine.

The key plot of the movie follows not the real An-na, but a simulation time loop created by An-na, where an AI synthetic human's Emotion Engine completes its training. The movie, therefore, focuses on motherly love and the promise she left with her son, which leads to the completion of the AI training and eventual survival of the Earth amidst the apocalyptic scenario.

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The Great Flood: Netflix's latest sci-fi South Korean film's plot and ending explained

The Great Flood is a 2025 South Korean film that showcases an apocalyptic scenario of a great flood that's destined to destroy humans. The movie starts off by showing a real-life scenario, where An-na, an AI researcher, tries to escape the flooding apartment complex with her son, Ja-in. She leaves him behind in the flood as she's taken by Isabela Labs to complete her research.

While she dies on her way to the company, she had already volunteered as a test subject to perfect the Emotion Engine she designed for synthetic humans to adopt and learn human emotions. Therefore, Isabela Labs extracts her memories to train the AI model through a time loop and simulation created by An-na, and the AI model is stuck in the last and worst day of her life, the day she dies.

The AI model, An-na, is tested to save her child from the flood, and every time she fails to do so or dies, she starts from scratch without any memory of the previous time loops. This is because AI learns from patterns and repetitions, to avoid and erase mistakes to land on the final solution. An-na goes through over 21,000 iterations to try to solve her quest. However, what eventually completes the AI model's training is the failure of the simulation.

Since the model was not designed with a time limit, the excessive iterations leave holes in the time loop, resulting in An-na and others retaining memory of their previous time loops and even regaining memory from reality. This way, the AI model, An-na, realizes that she needs to save Ja-in to escape the time loop, and she succeeds with the same, thereby completing the Emotion Engine's training.

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Interested viewers can now stream the movie, The Great Flood, on Netflix.

Edited by Aishwarya Sai