Netflix viewers say one movie is leaving them in tears — and one viewer put it bluntly, saying they cried so hard they almost threw up, then gave the film top marks anyway. The movie is Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, the 2009 drama directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen, Sarah Roemer, Jason Alexander and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.
The film is a remake of the 1987 Japanese film Hachikō Monogatari and is based on a true story: an Akita dog named Hachikō who lived in Japan from 1923 to 1935. The 2009 version moves the story to modern-day America, where a professor finds an abandoned dog, takes him home, and the two form a bond that viewers describe as unbreakable.
The reactions quoted in the piece are strikingly strong. Viewers say they were still emotional the next day, cried until they could barely breathe, or cried for hours — and that the film deepened their love of animals. Critics quoted in the article praise it as a heartwarming tearjerker, and Richard Gere himself is quoted saying he wept like a child when he first read the script, and again on a second reading.
That is the whole phenomenon in one sentence: a simple story about loyalty, told without tricks, that keeps reducing grown adults to tears. The “almost throwing up” line is a viewer’s own colourful description of how hard they cried — not a medical claim — but it explains why this 2009 film keeps resurfacing on Netflix watchlists.
