GDH’s latest tearjerker is not a cute-dog movie that happens to have feelings. It is a decade-long search for the word “home,” told through one white stray with a pink nose — and the three people who try, and fail, and try again, to keep him.
Gohan (โกฮัง..หัวใจโกโฮม, “Gohan… A Heart That Goes Home”) began streaming on Netflix on August 27, 2026, after opening in Thai cinemas on April 2 over Songkran. GDH’s official advice still stands: bring tissues.
imdb.com
Gohan (2026) – IMDb
One Dog, Three Owners, and a Question He Never Stops Asking
The premise is almost cruel in its simplicity. A white stray with a pink nose lives off scraps outside a convenience store in Si Racha and wants what every street animal wants and almost never gets: a warm place that does not disappear when the shop lights go off.
He finds Hiro, a Japanese automotive engineer heading into a retirement he did not choose. Hiro names him Gohan — “rice” — because the coat is that clean, that white. Later, grown, Gohan meets Namcha, a Myanmar housekeeper who shields him inside a shelter that is not quite a home. Later still, older and slower, he crosses paths with two university students, Pere and Jaidee, who treat him like a third roommate and a fourth heartbreak.
The film never pretends those three chapters are the same story. Love arrives. Separation arrives. New people arrive. What changes is what “home” is allowed to mean. What does not change is the dog.
The Selling Point Is Not the Dog. It Is the Architecture.
Plenty of movies put a camera on a cute animal and wait for the sniffles. Gohan is built differently.
Three directors split the life. Chayanop Boonprakob (Friend Zone, The Red Envelope) takes the puppy years — the chapter that looks and feels closest to a Japanese slice-of-life film, all quiet rooms and a man who has just lost the company that used to be his family. Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya (Bad Genius) takes the middle stretch, where the tone darkens and the film starts talking about who gets to stay in a country and who gets collected off the street. Atta Hemwadee (Not Friends) takes the last years, shifting into campus light and the messy tenderness of two students who are still figuring out how to keep each other, let alone an old dog.
That structure is the hook. You are not watching one style stretch across 145 minutes. You are watching three filmmakers answer the same question in three registers: if a life is only ever borrowed, what still counts as belonging?
The cast matches the map. Yasushi Kitajima plays Hiro. Myanmar actress Poe Mamhe Thar plays Namcha. Thai stars Jinjett Wattanasin and Tontawan Tantivejakul play Pere and Jaidee. Dialogue moves between Thai, Japanese, and Burmese without turning any of those lives into scenery. The studio behind it is GDH — the same house that made How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and Bad Genius — and the family resemblance is obvious. GDH knows how to make an abandoned someone (a grandmother, a student, a dog) feel like the center of a country, not a mascot.
The Dog on Screen Was Already Looking for a Home
The pink nose is not a CGI flourish. Gohan is played by three real dogs across the three ages: Kori as the pup, Meechok as the adult, and Hima as the senior. Hima, the face most people leave the theater talking about, was a rescued Bang Kaew-type found exhausted at a Chiang Mai market. Poonpiriya has said he pulled the dog into a hospital first and only later realized the face matched the character they had already written. The Adorable Puppy Cafe, the rescue that had been caring for him, sent him to set.
That fact does more work than any score swell. The movie is arguing that stray animals and the people who pick them up are often in the same condition: temporary, undocumented, one bad week from disappearing. Poonpiriya has put it more bluntly than the trailers do. The point is not that humans save dogs. It is that the saving runs both ways.
It Opened Like a Blockbuster and Traveled Like One
For a mid-budget dog drama, the numbers were not modest.
Gohan opened at No. 1 in Thailand over Songkran, outgrossing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie on the first weekend with about 30 million baht. It crossed the 100 million baht mark at home — roughly $3 million — and was widely talked about as Thailand’s top-grossing film of 2026 in the first half of the year. It then topped the Vietnamese box office on arrival, played competition at Italy’s Udine Far East Film Festival, screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and opened in mainland China on June 26 under the title 心犬相随 (“Where the Heart Follows the Dog”). GDH had already sold the film to more than 40 territories before Cannes.
None of that makes it an awards machine yet. It does mean the movie did the thing GDH now does on purpose: start as a Thai holiday weepie, leave the country as a story about care.
Where to Watch
Gohan is on Netflix as of August 27, 2026, after its April theatrical run in Thailand and a spring-summer rollout across Laos, the Philippines, Taiwan, Myanmar, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China.
Catalogs differ by country, so search the title in your local Netflix app. If it is listed, the runtime is about two hours and twenty-one minutes, the rating is gentle enough for families, and GDH was not joking about the tissues. The studio’s own line during promotion was that the dog does not die. That is not the same as saying you will be fine.
