The Great Flood Ending Explained: Do Ja-in and An-na Die?

Netflix’s ‘The Great Flood‘ is presented to the audience as a post-apocalyptic film, which turns out to be much more than that. It focuses on a mother and her young son, who are forced to fight for their lives as the entire world is engulfed by water, which keeps increasing its grasp and claiming more and more territory. This forces the woman to come up with unique solutions to keep herself and her son alive. While there are already too many challenges in her path, things keep getting more and more complicated as new information comes to light. By the end, the whole world appears in an entirely different picture, and it becomes clear that the fate of humanity rests in the hands of the mother and her son. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Great Flood Plot Synopsis

‘The Great Flood’ begins as a story about a woman and her child trying to survive the aftermath of an apocalyptic event. An-na wakes up to the realisation that a great flood has taken to the streets, and it is slowly rising. She has to save herself and her son, Ja-in, who is constantly trying to get her attention. She gets a call from a man named Hee-jo, who reveals that he has been sent by the Isabela Lab, where An-na works on a project called the Emotion Engine. He tells her that the previous night, an asteroid hit Antarctica, leading all of its ice to melt and causing an ecological nightmare that has not appeared in the form of incessant rain and a flood that is going to drown the whole world. His job is to get them to the roof where a company helicopter will arrive to take them away, but of course, this is not the complete story.

Halfway through the movie, it is revealed that the situation is much more complicated than that. An-na was a researcher working on creating an emotion machine that could create a new future for humanity in case something destroyed them. This meant the ability to create babies outside of a womb, and while the other departments dealt with that, it fell on An-na and her boss to make sure that these new babies had the emotions that would make them human. They called it the Emotion Engine. While they knew that babies would grow into human adults and ensure the future of the species, they’d still need adults around to take care of the babies. The young ones needed to be brought up and nurtured like any other human child, and for that, they needed a mother. The scientists found themselves in a Catch-22 situation with this because they needed a mother for the baby, but the mother needed to have the instincts to raise and protect the baby beforehand. This is where An-na came with a solution.

What was the Experiment?

An-na suggested that they make the babies first and have them raised by normal humans. In the meantime, they can create the prototype for a mother, and to prepare her for the real world, they will run her memories through a simulation. To prove that she is ready to take on the task, she must successfully complete the simulation, regardless of the number of attempts it takes. An-na devised a series of events that would test and develop all of the mother’s instincts in the process, while also keeping her in a controlled environment, allowing her to make as many mistakes as necessary for her growth.

The problem is that they were still working on the prototype of the mother when the asteroid hit Antarctica, melting all the ice and flooding the entire world, such that there was no way for humans to come out of it unscathed. The first half of the movie, where An-na is forced to leave Ja-in behind and fly away in a helicopter, is real. She boards a spaceship, one of the few remaining vessels carrying the last humans. An-na was essential to humanity’s survival because only she could finish the job on the Emotion Engine. She shares the plan of putting the mother in simulation with her boss when the accident happens, and their spaceship suffers damage, leading An-na to get impaled in the chest.

In her dying breaths, she asks to be turned into the subject, which means that she is volunteering to be the mother and will go through the simulations. If she succeeds in proving herself ready for the task, her memories will be unloaded into a new body, and the process can be repeated to create new mothers and children, who will then be sent back to the Earth to repopulate it. By the end of the movie, the experiment succeeds, against all odds. As the credits start to roll, we see spaceships heading towards the Earth, which means that the Emotion Engine has worked, and several pairs of mothers and children are ready to head back to the Earth and turn over a new leaf for humanity.

What did An-na Whisper to Ja-in? Do Ja-in and An-na Die?

By the first half of the movie, both Ja-in and An-na are technically dead. He dies when they cut his head open to retrieve his memories, while she dies on the spaceship when she is impaled by the debris of another spaceship. However, her memories are extracted before she passes away because she has volunteered to be the subject, and there is a reason why she does it. When An-na and Ja-in are separated, she is forced to leave him behind because she cannot fight off the soldiers who are not only ready to kill but are ready to die. Moreover, they retrieve Ja-in’s memories right in front of her eyes, which means it is already too late for her to save him.

However, if she succeeds in making the Emotion Engine work, she can find a way to save him. To assure Ja-in that she is not abandoning him, she tells him to wait for her. As she hugs him to say goodbye, she tells him to hide in the closet on the roof the next time. She knows that, despite it being a simulation, he will somehow retain this memory, most likely because his brain will only learn about survival and emotions by keeping the memories of everything that has happened to him before. So, even if the simulation starts all over again, he will have kept some of his memories.

By that time, An-na had already made up her mind to volunteer herself for the project as the mother. She purposefully hinges the success of the test on making the mother find the child because that’s what she really wanted all along. She knew that someone would have to go through the test, and she prepared herself to fight for it if push came to shove, but then, the spaceship was destroyed and its debris impaled. An-na knew she couldn’t die without fulfilling her promise to Ja-in, who would always wait for her. So, she makes sure that her memories are retrieved before she passes away. Fortunately, things go according to plan, and she is thrown into the simulation.

Does An-na Find Ja-in? Is the Experiment a Success?

The problem is that An-na doesn’t remember the promise she made, or the fact that she is actually dead, and this is just a simulation world. One simulation after another, she goes through the same loop, where Ja-in hides in the closet as instructed, and she has to try to find him. Each iteration brings a new challenge, but it also starts to build her memories. After the nth loop, she starts to remember things from the previous loop, and even starts to get back the memories from before she died. However, it is all a jumble inside her head, and it takes her a while to piece things together. Eventually, she succeeds in finding Ja-in inside the closet, but not because she remembers it, but because her gut leads her there. It is when she finds him that he tells her that he hid in the closet because she asked him to.

Their reunion is cut short by the arrival of the soldier, and as she tells Ja-in to run, it looks like they might get separated yet again. This time, however, her willpower to be with her son is so strong that it allows her to break through the confines of the simulation, which means she can move forward to take the leap into the unknown just to hold Ja-in in her arms again. It is this motherly love and instinct that the experiment was supposed to develop in the subject, and having broken through it, An-na is ready to be the mother to Ja-in. In the end, we see her swim towards Ja-in as a huge wave makes its way to them. She knows what’s coming, so to distract Ja-in, she tells him to hold his breath and take a dive with her. The last visual is of the wave crashing over them. This means that the simulation has ended, and they are dead in that simulation, but because they have achieved the purpose of the test, the loop has broken, and they are ready to enter the real world.

Once the credits start to roll, a new reality emerges. Both An-na and Ja-in have received new bodies, though their memories remain the same, so they remember their previous experiences and the bond they share with each other. Not only that, but they are also seated in a space capsule which is headed towards the Earth, and they are not the only ones. We see several of those capsules making their way towards the Earth, which shows that there are many others like An-na and Ja-in. This means that once An-na was able to break through the simulation and achieve the emotional level she needed to be Ja-in’s mother, the same model was used to create other mothers, and now all these mother-child pairs are being sent to the Earth to start a new life and restart the cycle of life, bringing humanity back to the Earth. Meanwhile, the others, or what was left of humanity after the flood, will stay in orbit to monitor things, at least until the circumstances are good enough for them to return to their home planet.

What Happens to Son Hee-jo?

As it is revealed that An-na is in a simulation, it turns out that everything and everyone she comes across in this simulation are the people she came across in real life on the day that she chose to recreate in the simulation. One of those people was Son Hee-jo, who was sent to retrieve her and Ja-in and take them to the roof where a helicopter would be waiting for them. He tells her that she will be taken to a shelter point, but later, it turns out that even he doesn’t know the entire extent of the plan. There is no other shelter point because An-na and the others are supposed to leave the Earth on spaceships, while everyone else is going to die on the Earth. They can only take forward the people who are responsible for the survival of humanity, and people like Hee-jo are not one of them.

So, when the helicopter arrives to take An-na, Hee-jo is killed by the soldiers. This is a shock to An-na because she thought he’d be joining her, and not surprisingly, he thought so too. But it turns out his bosses had lied to him, and he was never supposed to leave. To keep him from trying to fight his way out and enter the helicopter, he is shot dead. However, because he is an important part of An-na’s last day, he appears in the simulation, and each iteration brings out a different version of him. Eventually, An-na uses her knowledge from previous loops to remind Hee-jo about his death, which leads him to become her ally, and he helps her find Ja-in. Eventually, however, as the loop breaks, Hee-jo is not the one to ascend into a new body. His body and memories are gone because he died on Earth, and his memories were never preserved. So, once the simulation ends, the version of Hee-jo that existed there also dies.