Jesse Eisenberg’s cleverly titled A Real Pain follows two American cousins who make a trip to Poland to visit the house in which their grandmother Dora had lived. Dora had been in the apartment until she sent to a Nazi concentration camp in the 1940s. The trip is a way for David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) to pay tribute to Dora, who survived the Holocaust, and remember the millions who didn’t.
The cousins are prickly pear and mushy peach. David is as nervy and proper as Benji is confident and uninhibited. Benji sprinkles his unfiltered speech with hippieisms and thinks nothing of living up to the stereotype of the loud, pushy and context-agnostic American tourist.
“Love the exchange rate!” Benji yells when he learns that he has first class train tickets. The sombreness of a visit to a Nazi extermination camp, as well as memories of Dora, soon catch up with Benji.
A Real Pain, which is out in cinemas, is mostly a two-hander between Eisenberg and Culkin. None of the other characters, notably Will Sharpe’s overly solicitous British tour guide, registers, especially before Culkin’s Benji, who most vividly expresses the generational trauma and resilience of the Jewish people.
Other filmmakers have more rigorously explored the unspeakable brutality of concentration camps – Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) come to mind. No film reveals the absurdity – and peculiar necessity – of camera-toting tourists walking by gas chambers as Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Austerlitz (2016).
The 90-minute A Real Pain is most sharply attuned to its mismatched leading men. The banter between the cousins flows easily in Eisenberg’s screenplay despite its truncated quality. Humour emerges as a shield against melancholia, as well as a mask to hide uncomfortable truths.
The made-for-streaming feel to the visuals can’t hide the luminosity of Kieran Culkin’s performance. At times thick-skinned and immature – like his character Roman Roy in the series Succession – but always bursting with energy and sudden wisdom, Culkin is a delight. He is so effortless that Eisenberg generously steps out of the way, letting his co-star run away with the film and emerge as its beating heart.
