Cora

Positives:
• Intensely gripping first act with high-stakes survival sequences
• Kim Da-mi’s powerhouse performance anchors the emotional heart
• Convincing and affecting mother-child dynamic
• Visually striking and physically immersive set-pieces

Negatives:
• Sci-fi shift in the second half overwhelms narrative clarity
• Repetitive dialogue and uneven pacing
• Hee-jo is underdeveloped and largely functional
• Later VFX, editing, and score sometimes fail to support ambition
• Ambitious ideas clash with the grounded survival story


IN DETAIL [SPOILERS!]:

I like to believe that world-ending natural disasters belong to movies, not to the actual future waiting outside my window. The Great Flood leans into that fantasy, imagining a planet surrendering to water, while narrowing its focus to one woman, her child, and an apartment building in Seoul that is slowly becoming a coffin.

The story begins with Koo An-na and her young son, Ja-in, waking up to an emergency already in motion. The water is rising. The building is filling. Neighbors are panicking, climbing, disappearing. What struck me early on was how quickly the film establishes its physical stakes. This is not about spectacle at first; it is about movement, breath, space, and the constant calculation of how long you can stay alive in a place that no longer wants you there.

That early stretch works. It works largely because Kim Da-mi commits to the role without cushioning it. Her An-na is not stylized or heroic; she is tired, alert, and governed by instinct. The relationship with her son feels grounded, not designed to manufacture tears. Even when the child is difficult, as children in crisis tend to be, the dynamic holds, and I stayed with them.

The film also understands, briefly, how to use the body as a storytelling tool. The best moments rely on physical effort rather than explanation. Climbing, holding, waiting, misjudging distance... these sequences are tightly constructed and genuinely tense. For a while, I was convinced the film knew exactly what it was doing.

Then the writing starts talking too much.

Details about An-na’s past are dropped in with little grace, as if the film does not trust its own disaster to be meaningful enough on its own. Trauma is underlined instead of allowed to exist. Dialogue begins to circle the same ideas. Scenes repeat their emotional purpose without advancing anything. I caught myself drifting, and once that happened, it was hard to fully return.

By the middle of the film, I realized I had lost track of why certain things mattered. An-na’s professional importance, supposedly the reason Son Hee-jo is searching for her, had faded into the background. Hee-jo himself never solidified into a person for me; he remains more of a function than a character, present because the plot requires him to be.

When the film shifts into overt science fiction in its final act, I felt it slip through my fingers entirely. The intimacy that carried the opening is discarded in favor of ideas that are gestured at but never properly shaped. Concepts replace people. Explanations replace tension. Whatever the film is trying to argue about humanity’s future becomes increasingly difficult to pin down.

Worse, the craft begins to unravel alongside the story. The visual effects lose credibility, the flashbacks feel clumsily assembled, and the music presses itself into scenes without offering any insight. Instead of building toward something, the film becomes louder, busier, and less coherent.

By the end, I wasn’t frustrated so much as disappointed. The Great Flood starts with a clear sense of purpose and a strong emotional anchor, then gradually abandons both. Kim Da-mi gives it everything she has, and for a while, that is enough. Eventually, though, the film drowns its own strengths, leaving behind the sense of a story that never decided what it wanted to be.