A REAL PAIN

(Check our Chris Reed’s A Real Pain movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

Jesse Eisenberg follows up his 2022 directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, with another carefully realized character study filled with equal parts comedy and drama. The story follows two cousins—David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin, HBO’s Succession series)—on a Jewish-heritage tour in Poland. Their dearly departed grandmother, who came from Lublin and survived the Holocaust, left them both money to make the trip, and now that they have finally made the plans, off they go.

The journey immediately proves a little bumpy, if not rocky, given how different these two adult men, once much closer when younger, have grown over the years. Anxious and borderline obsessive, David, a gainfully employed, married father to a school-aged son, is the kind of person who stresses about arriving on time yet is always running late. He’s also an introvert. Benji, single and adrift, thinks little of schedules but is somehow at the airport long before David. He’s the extrovert of the duo, always looking for connection, no matter how small. He’s also not bothered about taking or doing what he wants, irrespective of the feelings of others.

Theirs is a small tour group, led by James (Will Sharpe, HBO’s The White Lotus series), who is neither Polish nor Jewish, but rather a British scholar of Eastern European Jewish history and an enthusiast for the area’s culture. The four other group members are Marcia (Jennifer Grey, as in Dirty Dancing Jennifer Grey), a recent divorcée; Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan, I Used to Be Famous), a Jewish convert and a Canadian by way of Rwanda, where he survived that country’s genocide; and the married couple Diane (Liza Sadovy, Mother Teresa & Me) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes, Abe). All may have different reasons for making the trip, but they each look to understand and appreciate that which once existed and was subsequently lost.

As we travel from city to city and site to site, A Real Pain explores in increasingly greater depth the relationship between David and Benji, as well as the way different people process emotions and, yes, pain. Mixing gentle—and sometimes laugh-out-loud—humor with tender pathos, Eisenberg deftly peels back the layers of what we think we know to reveal more profound truths below. It’s often uncomfortable, frequently funny, and always entertaining.

The members of the ensemble ably support the two leads, who play beautifully the one off the other. Culkin and Eisenberg have an onscreen rapport that speaks to years of sibling-like rivalry and friendship. There’s nothing like a backdrop of real-life horror, which includes a visit to a concentration camp, to force even the smallest of complaints into sharp perspective.

As powerful as many of the moments are here, not all aspects of the screenplay come together seamlessly by the end. There’s an unfinished quality to the conclusion that might suit the characters but may frustrate some viewers. Imperfection is not always a defect, however, and a lack of resolution is perhaps the only logical way to finish a tale rooted as much in human misery as joy. Pain is relative.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

Searchlight Pictures; Jesse Eisenberg; A Real Pain

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