Water surges through shattered windows of a Seoul high-rise as Kim Da-mi, soaked to the bone and eyes blazing with maternal fury, clutches her young son to her chest in newly released stills from Netflix’s upcoming disaster epic The Great Flood. In another frame, the same child—blissfully unaware of the apocalypse—holds up a crayon drawing with an innocent smile while murky floodwater creeps ever higher around them. With only one week until the film’s worldwide premiere, these haunting images capture the suffocating desperation at the heart of director Kim Byung-woo’s sci-fi survival thriller.
The Great Flood plunges audiences into the final hours of a drowning world. An unprecedented global deluge has swallowed cities whole continents, and the last remnants of humanity are trapped inside a luxury apartment tower rapidly turning into a vertical tomb. At the center of the storm is Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi), a brilliant AI researcher and single mother whose groundbreaking work may hold the only key to restarting civilization—if she and her son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) can survive long enough to finish it. The stills show An-na’s transformation from composed scientist to primal protector, her arms locked around Ja-in as debris-filled water laps at their waists, her face a mixture of terror and unbreakable resolve.
Only then does the rescue arrive in the form of Son Hee-jo, portrayed by Park Hae-soo. A battle-hardened security operative dispatched on an almost impossible extraction mission, Hee-jo is seen wading through chest-deep currents, radio crackling, pistol raised, expression carved from granite as he fights his way floor by floor toward An-na and the child. His presence injects military precision into the chaos, but the clock—and the rising water—is merciless.
Kim Da-mi, celebrated for layered performances in Itaewon Class and Our Beloved Summer, spoke about the emotional core of her character: “I wanted to show Anna’s emotional growth throughout the story. Through her, I wanted to portray the feeling of love.”
Park Hae-soo, fresh from global breakthroughs in Squid Game and Narco-Saints, described crafting a very different kind of hero: “I wanted to shape Hee Jo into someone truly fit for the mission—portraying the strength of a mercenary-like soldier.”
Directed and co-written by Kim Byung-woo (*The Terror Live*), with practical water tanks and underwater filming pushing the cast to their physical limits over six grueling months, The Great Flood is already generating feverish anticipation ahead of its December 19 Netflix debut.
Here is the latest trailer for The Great Flood:
