A Real Pain

Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature as director is 90 minutes long and takes place almost entirely on a Holocaust heritage tour of Poland. It stars Eisenberg himself as David, the organised, slightly withholding cousin, and Kieran Culkin as Benji, the charismatic, chaotic cousin who can’t stop talking to strangers. They are travelling together to honour the memory of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who had wanted them to see where she came from.

The premise risks every kind of failure — the twee Holocaust dramedy, the Odd Couple road movie, the trauma tourism that aestheticises what it claims to mourn — and Eisenberg navigates all of it with a sureness that his debut, When You Finish Saving the World (2022), didn’t quite manage. The key is Culkin, whose performance as Benji is one of the year’s best: a man who is genuinely joyful, genuinely thoughtful, and genuinely unable to manage the ordinary mechanics of adult life. He is not a quirky sidekick. He is a fully realised person who has found a way of being in the world that costs him enormously.

What We Inherit

The film’s subject is inheritance — not of trauma in the theoretical sense, but of specific things: a grandmother’s apartment in Warsaw, her way of making tea, the particular quality of her attention. A scene late in the film, when Benji reads aloud from a letter she wrote, is the film’s emotional apex. It is not a tearjerker scene. Eisenberg holds the camera still and lets Culkin do it, and Culkin does it without ornament.

“The film asks what it means to remember someone who survived something unsurvivable, and it does this not by dramatising the unsurvivable thing but by dramatising the specific weight of that inheritance on two men who carry it differently.”

The other tour participants — a couple, a recent convert, an older man travelling alone — are written with economy and humanity. Will Sharpe as a British-Rwandan man who has joined the tour for his own reasons gets one speech that reframes the film’s concerns in a way that lingers.

At 90 minutes, A Real Pain is ideally sized. It doesn’t overstay; it doesn’t under-explain. Eisenberg has made a film about grief, Jewish identity, and the difficulty of loving someone whose pain you can’t fully access — and he has made it feel small and portable and real.