A Real Pain (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Graham Fuller

Produced by Jesse Eisenberg, Ali Herting, Dave McCary, Ewa Puszczyńska, Jennifer Semler, and Emma Stone; written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg; cinematography by Michał Dymek; edited by Robert Nassau; production design by Mela Melak; costume design by Małgorzata Fudala; music by Erick Eiser; starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes. Color, 90 min., 2024. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain begins in a busy lounge at New York’s JFK airport. The camera drifts anonymously past seated and rising passengers before wheeling round and dollying toward the anxious Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) sitting alone. The film’s title appears to the left of his head, its placement implying that Benji will prove to be a pain in the ass, but his frown suggests inner turmoil. Both suppositions have borne fruit by the time the shot recurs at the end with the title positioned to the right of Benji’s head. A lost child in his thirties, he despairs of finding anyone to connect with, a port in his perpetual storm. Between these rhyming shots, Benji and his cousin David (played by Eisenberg) journey to Poland to honor their late grandmother, Dory, by visiting her old home in Krasnystaw. A few hours before they find it, they visit the preserved Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin. Historian Tomasz Kranz, director of Majdanek’s state museum, asserted, in 2005, that approximately fifty-nine thousand Jews and nineteen thousand others were murdered at the camp between October 1941 and July 1944. When eighteen-thousand Jews were shot there on November 3, 1943, music was played to muffle their screams. 

Eisenberg’s second feature as a writer-director is a poignant buddy comedy that probes the relative nature of pain. It does not dilute Benji’s anguish, or the anguish he arouses in David, but since these Jewish American millennials are grandchildren of a woman who narrowly escaped being exterminated along with nearly everyone she knew, it poses a moral question: “How do we reconcile modern pain against the backdrop of historical suffering?” as Eisenberg put it in an interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light. “How do we think about ourselves in our middle-class comfortable lives when there is suffering around the world now? And is our grief and modern-day discomfort valid when there are so many greater horrors in the world?”

A Real Pain was mostly filmed on location in Poland. The Krasnystaw house that Benji and David visit was once the actual home of Eisenberg’s Great Aunt Doris, who emigrated to the United States with his paternal grandfather’s family in 1918. A blunt speaker who died at the age of 106 in 2019, Doris is credited by Eisenberg as the person who “shaped my life,” much as Benji credits Dory, for whom he grieves. All but one of Eisenberg’s forebears who remained in Krasnystaw were executed following Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland. “They were taken to the cemetery and shot, which was doubly strange, because our [film] trailers were parked across the street from the cemetery,” Eisenberg told The Independent. Only his cousin Maria, who lived in Izbica, south of Lublin, survived the Holocaust. She remained in Poland, still in perilous circumstances, after World War II. Eisenberg met her when he and his wife, Anna Strout, visited the country in 2008; Vanessa Redgrave portrayed Maria opposite Eisenberg in The Revisionist, his 2013 Off-Broadway play about their relationship.  

Dory, whose absence structures A Real Pain—her stoical manner contrasted with Benji’s kvetching—is a composite of Doris and Maria. Eisenberg was also prompted to make the film after seeing an advertisement for “Auschwitz tours (with lunch),” his issue with it subtly modified in the film through Benji’s interactions with James (Will Sharpe), the guide of the “Holocaust tour” that the cousins join. The Benji–David storyline originated in Eisenberg’s 2017 short story “Mongolia.” Its narrator ironically reflects on a life-changing trip he took to that country, as a passive, insecure type, with a narcissistic former college acquaintance named Denis. Like Denis, Benji spouts unconsidered anticapitalist rhetoric. Unlike Denis, Benji is deeply attached to his traveling companion.

Benji and David have a long history. Benji comforted the homesick David when they attended summer camp as children. When they were young men carousing in Manhattan, Benji became dependent on David’s company. Each is the hypersensitive spawn of Borscht Belt humor and the Woody Allen school of comic neurosis. Modeled by Eisenberg on himself, introverted David suffers obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety, and depression that he manages with pills, but he is purposeful and reasonably content. He has a career (scorned by Benji) as a digital ad salesman and lives comfortably in a Manhattan brownstone with his wife and a three-year-old son he adores. 

Though charismatic and gregarious, Benji—whom Eisenberg had initially intended to play—is jobless and directionless, a lonely stoner stuck living in his mother’s basement in upstate Binghamton. His mood swings and lack of a verbal filter indicate he has bipolar disorder. His mercurial behavior includes turning up early for events, which flummoxes David to comic effect. By the time David arrives at JFK, having frequently called Benji en route expecting him to be running late, he discovers that Benji has been there for several hours. Benji effusively greets David but worries his risk-averse cousin by telling him that he is bringing weed to Poland. He has bought David a yogurt, already too warm to eat, but takes control of the bag of mixed nuts David shares with him—a hint of delusional thinking. After they have flown to Warsaw and checked in at their hotel (the weed having arrived by mail, meaning David need not have fretted that they would be arrested), David tells Benji that he wants to shower. Benji immediately decides to shower first and commandeers David’s cell phone so that he can listen to music in the bathroom. He also observes that David’s feet are “as graceful as fuck,” a backhanded compliment that causes David to regard them suspiciously when he is alone. Such actions demonstrate Benji’s self-centeredness and passive-aggressiveness, traits characteristic of some people with bipolar disorder during depressive episodes. For his part, David—whose subjectivity the film privileges—responds with bafflement to Benji’s rudeness, indicating he has no understanding of his cousin’s clinical condition.

Benji greets their fellow tour group members with some inappropriate comments after James asks each of them to introduce themselves. They are Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a recently divorced sixtyish Brooklynite whose mother survived the Holocaust; the retired Shaker Heights wife and husband Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), whose Polish ancestors emigrated to the United States around 1900; and the younger Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan who emigrated to Canada with his mother following the 1994 genocide and converted to Judaism because of his affinity with persecuted Jewish people. After Eloge (inspired by a Rwandan friend of Eisenberg) has told his story, Benji calls out “Snap!” Realizing he has been tactless, Benji apologetically covers up his faux pas. Eisenberg’s writing and Culkin’s performance combine to present Benji in shades of gray, not simplistically manic or depressive, but often caught between those states, where he is capable of being sensitive to others’ feelings.

And like many people with bipolar disorder, Benji is empathetic. When the group is traversing Warsaw, he senses that Marcia, who is walking alone, is melancholy, so he hurries to console her, albeit by asking, “What are you? A fucking loser?” After Benji and David are parted by mutual anger one night, Benji and Marcia sit up talking off screen. Eisenberg lets the viewer deduce that Benji is drawn to Marcia—dumped by her husband, neglected by her married daughter—because she is as lonely as he is.

As James leads the group to places memorializing World War II and the Holocaust, Eisenberg modulates their experiences according to Benji’s reactions, which frequently conflict with David’s. At the main section of the Warsaw Uprising Memorial in Krasiński Square, Benji poses in combat mode alongside the bronze statue of seven heroic insurgents, coaxing Eloge, Marcia, James, Diane, and Mark to follow suit. David is too self-conscious to participate and worried they are being irreverent, so is left to take cell phone photos of the others. 

When the group heads southeast to the Lublin area, Benji spirals. He vehemently protests that it is profane to travel first class on a train in Poland, given the inhuman way victims were transported to the camps. The others think this too fine a principle, but David follows Benji to the back of the train, whereupon they get into a scrape that lands them in a first-class car on a different train. “We deserve it,” Benji contrarily remarks. At the Old Jewish Cemetery in Lublin, Benji is irked by the well-meaning James continuing to pour out a stream of information in a place that demands quiet contemplation—perhaps, too, by James’s detachment from the Holocaust as an Oxford-educated non-Jew with a soft Northern English accent and bland diction. Benji’s advice to James to speak less, however, comes across as a rebuke that badly hurts his feelings.  

Matters come to a boil in a restaurant that night when David, who’s telling the group a story about Dory, indirectly discloses (with unconscious malice) that she considered Benji a slacker. Benji, who loved and revered Dory, goes into a sulk and sneers at the values of Jews, like their grandma Dory and Mark’s family, who became well-off after emigrating to America. Benji then belches loudly for effect and walks out on the dinner, leaving the tearful David to apologize for his cousin’s behavior and to explain that, six months previously, Benji’s mother found him lying on a couch having overdosed on pills in a suicide attempt. 

The others sympathize with David until they realize that it is Benji, not one of the restaurant musicians, who is playing “Tea for Two” on a nearby piano with his back to their table—overshadowing David when, for once, he has everyone’s attention. The jaunty tune diegetically undercuts the serious tone set by the soundtrack’s use of Chopin’s Études and Nocturnes, just as Benji’s “episodes” disturb David’s equilibrium. Now it is David’s turn to walk out on the dinner; as he strides along a street almost in sync with the jaunty song, it mocks his self-righteous snit.

David has a point about Benji’s maddening behavior but, as he later admits, his resentment is stoked by his envy of Benji’s effortless charm and ability to make people like him. The audience experiences the effect of Benji’s stealing of David’s thunder when the group’s applause fills the soundtrack after Benji finishes playing the piano—diverting interest from the figure of his cousin on screen. Compounding David’s agitation the next morning, Benji breezily phones him from their hotel lobby to awaken him, as if nothing had happened.

The tacit competition between the cousins ceases for the duration of the group’s somber tour of Majdanek. They observe in silence a gas chamber, the ovens in the crematorium, and a cage in a barracks exhibiting the heaped shoes of the dead. Successive medium shots of each member of the group framed in front of a window (believed to have been added after the war) shows them staring aghast at a chamber wall partially stained blue by the lethal hydrogen cyanide gas Zyklon B. The characters’ proximity to the horror temporarily nullifies their personal problems. But it also equalizes and unites them—ordinary people afforded a glance into the heart of evil and sickened by it. A Real Pain is timely given current rumblings of neofascism.

Back in Lublin after the excursion to Madjanek, Benji and David part from the others, all but Mark (who has no patience for Benji) hugging them or shaking their hands. Chastened by Benji’s scolding at the cemetery, James thanks Benji for his advice (which Benji has typically forgotten) and they embrace. James only gives David a cursory wave, which makes the latter reflect again on people’s preference for Benji.

That night Benji and David share their last joint on a hotel rooftop. They remark on the lights illuminating Majdanek two miles away—Eisenberg keeping the Holocaust in mind as the talk turns to Benji’s inertia and isolation. Benji complains that David never visits him in Binghamton. David defensively registers his contempt for the town and claims that he’s too busy with his job and his family to visit Benji. This exchange is one of the film’s most significant because it emphasizes that individuals’ wounds and disappointments do not hurt less because they have inherited the memory of the genocide inflicted on their people and borne witness to it. The conversation also reveals that David has cravenly avoided Benji since he swallowed the pills.

The next day, they travel to Kraznystaw to see Dory’s old house, an experience that, anticlimactically, moves them as little as it moved Eisenberg when he visited it as his great aunt’s one-time home in 2008. Any sense that Benji and David have claimed some moral high ground with their trip to Poland is undercut by their trying to leave talismanic stones on the house’s doorstep, as they left them as a tribute on a gravestone in the cemetery. Looking on from a neighboring balcony, an old Pole, his words interpreted by his son, warns the cousins that their stones could be hazardous to the house’s current elderly occupant, so they remove them. 

Having flown back to JFK, the cousins are passing through the lounge from the first scene when David guiltily invites Benji to come for dinner with him and his family. Benji declines the offer or even a lift from David to Penn Station. He knows David loves him but realizes that the emotional gulf between them has become unbridgeable.

All is not lost, however. Benji may well have liberated himself from his yearning for David’s care. David’s mystification over Benji’s decision to stay at the airport reiterates his obtuseness where his cousin’s mental health is concerned, even as Eisenberg has usefully familiarized the audience with its complexities. That he has achieved this without trivializing it in the shadow of Majdanek is no small miracle.

Graham Fuller is a Cineaste Associate.

Copyright © 2025 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2