A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg Drills Lightly Through the Psyche of Two Close Cousins

By Karen Gordon

Rating: B-plus

There’s a whole lot going on below the surface of writer/director Jesse Eisenberg’s tender and deceptively low-key film A Real Pain.

Superficially, it plays like an indie buddy comedy. But this film walks lightly and comes at its subject matter so obliquely, that it never aims to overwhelm the viewer.  It’s about a multitude of deep emotional things, including grief, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of love.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg overcome mind games in A Real Pain

Eisenberg plays David, a New Yorker with a wife, young son, and a steady-if-somewhat-routine job in tech, all things that should and sometimes do ground him.  When we first meet him, he’s headed to the airport to meet his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin in a tour de force performance).  And from the film’s first frames we get a good sense of who David is:  anxious, introverted, eager-to-please, neurotic.

Benji has already been at the airport for hours, and not because he’s punctual.  Wearing shorts and a hoodie that signals a sort of arrested development, he is, on the surface, David’s opposite:  edgy, unfiltered and inappropriate. And, in a weird way, that adds up to charismatic. 

The two, who were born months apart and were raised almost like brothers, have fallen out for unknown reasons, and haven’t seen each other in a few years.  They have reunited for a trip to Poland, a tour gifted to them by their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whom they both adored.  

They’re part of a small group of tourists in an organized Jewish history heritage tour. The trip, from Warsaw to Lublin, includes a visit to the concentration camp of Majdanek  where the Nazis murdered more than a million Jews.  Benji and David plan to hive off from the group and take the final day to see the house where their grandmother lived in in the town of Kranystaw before the war. For the cousins, it’s a pilgrimage. 

The group includes their guide James (Will Sharpe), the recently divorced Marsha (Jennifer Grey) who seeks her family’s roots  and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan-Canadian refugee who escaped the genocide and ended up in Winnipeg where he  found connection with the Jewish community as a convert. 

For Eloge, genocide, the Holocaust and all its horrors and scars, is a lived experience. 

The cousins, of course, are living in a much different, modern world, but the legacy of the Holocaust and the experiences of their grandmother are part of their DNA.

This is obviously serious stuff, and Eisenberg could have made an emotionally heavy movie. But that’s not his style and it’s not what he’s aiming for here.   

In fact, Eisenberg makes the film feel effortless and almost anticlimactic with an oblique and subtle approach, focusing on the relationship between David and Benji.  Benji manipulates his cousin in subtle ways, while David is so caught up in understanding him that he’s comically oblivious to the manipulation.

A Real Pain won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, and is based on Eisenberg’s personal experience. His family were Polish Jews and his grandmother lived in the house we see in the film.  He went to Poland to look up the family history, which he first turned into a successful 2012 off-Broadway play called The Revisionist.  A Real Pain takes the story into slightly different territory. 

And although the film carries itself with a light touch, it asks a lot of questions: about the meaning of legacy and the ineffability of reconciling thoughts, emotions, histories, that are too terrible to really absorb, but are part of their family history. 

This is the second film Eisenberg has directed. The first was 2022’s underrated When You Finish Saving the World, which starred Julianne Moore.  With A Real Pain, he’s showing himself to be a director who can make light character-driven movies of significance. Probing the human psyche without being cliche or frivolous is tougher than it looks. 

I don’t want to imply here that his movies are grueling or difficult. They are, in fact, the opposite.  And yet, he has an ability to to give us characters and situations that are comfortable to watch, but leave us with something deeper, something that feels true and even essential.

He also knows how to cast.  While he plays a character that is ‘Eisenbergian,’ a young man trying to calm down his neuroses, he gives the heavy lifting to Culkin, who turns in the kind of performance that has already started people talking about Oscar nominations.  

A Real Pain. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. Opens in theatres, Friday, November 8.