A Real PainReview: Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Take an Unforgettable Trip

Mar. 15, 2025

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in “A Real Pain”.Photo:Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Sometimes a modest film can trip you up like a tree root thrusting up through the sidewalk.

The movie begins as a kind of road-trip buddy movie, although from the start the humor has a reserved dryness — Eisenberg doesn’t seem like someone who would ever use “LOL” without a fine edge of contempt.

Their British guide (Will Sharpe), who apologizes for being the only member of the party who isn’t Jewish, informs them at the start that “this will be a tour about pain.” He says “pain” in an earnest but oddly hollow way that makes it clear he doesn’t understand how the word registers with these people traveling into a world that, to them, is death. He’s acutely sensitive, in his way, but he could be a hotel concierge explaining how the blinds work.

As the group visits landmarks in Warsaw and then moves on to Lubin, Benji is fun, outgoing and often overbearing — he refuses to stay in a first-class train seat, arguing that this insults the Jews who were treated like cattle en route to the death camps. David is more reigned in, but also medicated to deal with years of anxiety. Benji spills his gut; David is tightly, uncomfortably trussed.

Eisenberg’s script delineates these high-contrast cousins with such deceptive ease, you might initially feel he’s venturing across territory you already know.

In its first third or so, the film feels as if it might wind up like Woody Allen’sVicky Cristina Barcelona,a coolly observed philosophical comedy that suggests that two friends, one adventuresome (Scarlett Johansson) and the other cautious (Rebecca Hall), will pursue their individual paths — obey their natures — all the way to the grave. David and Benji’s interactions also suggest the heartbreakingly unstable brother-sister relationship between Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo inYou Can Count on Me.

But eventually you realize that Eisenberg is quietly pushing beyond those two films (both of which happen to be classics, so that tells you something).

Benji is psychologically unmoored in a way that the film and Culkin (who’s excellent) make fully plausible: He has no job, veers from exultant happiness to cratering sadness and spends hours alone at the airport, studying other travelers. And he can be cruel: He admonishes the tour guide to stop piling on details of Jewish history with a strained niceness so cutting and false it all but demolishes the poor man.

But why is Benji this way? You never really know, even while you cry for him. David, on the other hand, is more understandable — life, to him, is a battle, and to close down emotionally is a form of self-preservation. Actually, you cry for him too.

Eisenberg, to his credit, films these scenes with a mute lack of drama, letting the ovens and piles of discarded shoes express their horror without any dramatic shadowing or darkening.

From these two threads — the cousins’ disparate lives and their third-generation attempt to honor the Jews destroyed in World War II — Eisenberg has woven a much larger, richer story. It draws on more themes than I probably can, or should, count. You should just see the movie and experience it.

Two last things:

1.) The score features, almost exclusively, the music ofChopin, Poland’s great composer. The effect is elegiac and tenderly melancholic, like sadness instead of electricity humming along a wire.

2.) When all is said and done,A Real Painsays more about the Holocaust thanThe Zone of Interest.

And it’s a comedy!

A Real Painis in select theaters now, then everywhere Nov. 15.

source: people.com