The movie Dog is about an army ranger with PTSD named Jackson Briggs who is tasked with taking a military dog named Lulu to Arizona to attend the funeral of the soldier who owned her. Because the dog has a history of aggressive behavior, after the funeral, Jackson is supposed to take the dog to New Mexico to be euthanized. It’s your typical road movie where the involved parties start out on this journey together not really liking each other, but after they go through a few funny, sad, or life-altering experiences on the way to their destination, they bond and realize that they actually aren’t all that different. This is that movie again.
The scenes in the movie where Briggs wakes up in the middle of the night covered in sweat and writhing in pain were hard for me to watch. I don’t know how authentic those scenes are because I’ve never experienced that kind of suffering, nor have I ever witnessed anyone else going through it, but if it is anywhere as bad in real life as it looked on-screen, I have nothing but sympathy for the people who deal with PTSD every day. Lulu is also dealing with her own trauma from years of military service. This, I believe, is why the two of them begin to understand and accept each other. They are both dealing with the same pain. Maybe no one can understand your pain better than someone else who has gone through the same things you have.