‘A Real Pain’ Review – Jesse Eisenberg’s Sophomore Outing Is An Essential Piece Of Jewish Cinema [Sundance 2024]

Much of the human experience is recognizing that you are not and may never be equipped to reckon with the trauma of your ancestors and, subsequently, your own. Especially in the wake of a global pandemic that left us all looking inward, it has become so much easier to keep all of your feelings inside than to surrender yourself to whatever challenges lie underneath. To then have the capacity to reach someone else is an even greater challenge, but one that actor turned writer turned writer-director Jesse Eisenberg is hopeful he can chip away at. Two Sundances ago, he premiered his auspicious debut, When You Finish Saving The World, a hilariously incisive but also deeply empathic portrait of a mother and son who slowly cross generational divides (and, yes, traumas) to see each other’s contributions to the world. The film saw a relatively lukewarm response, likely because its biting cynicism and delightfully awkward characters were too canted for some audiences to fully engage with.

Now, with his sophomore outing, A Real Pain, Eisenberg took the festival by storm in comparison. There are countless reasons for this, all of which amount to a more openly emotional film that embraces its journey toward vulnerability more holistically. As opposed to When You Finish Saving The World, where its two leads spend the majority of their time apart, A Real Pain very intentionally keeps its acutely dysfunctional pair attached at the hip: David (Eisenberg, this time on screen), an online advertising sales rep who is socially neurotic but relatively put together, and Benji (the remarkable Kieran Culkin), his charming but deadbeat cousin who often comes on too strong. The film follows the pair as they travel to Poland through a Holocaust remembrance tour to find the ancestral home of their late grandmother. Through honoring their family history, repressed issues naturally bubble up to the surface.

Eisenberg’s voice as a writer is distinctly perceptive of people’s complex personalities and, specifically, character flaws. His two lead characters would be easy to pin – the straight man and the wild card – if it weren’t for the edges he carves into them from frame one. David appears to be more socially conscious of any given situation, but his need to not cross any boundaries cuts him off from feeling honest to god human connection with any of his tourmates. Meanwhile, Benji is almost explosively humanistic, going past cordial to instant friendship and camaraderie. He isn’t afraid to embarrass himself, though his transparency gives way to burdening others, usually David, with difficult emotional outbursts and wanderlust irresponsibility. It doesn’t help that David is largely viewed as successful and responsible, with a steady job and a wife and son, while Benji is mostly aimless and still living with his parents. The characters go through a push and pull of likable and unlikable decisions that make them, more than anything else, human.

Eisenberg’s choice to cast both himself and Culkin as David and Benji is a foundational one that works wonders for his story. Eisenberg has always been a talented actor but is channeled into a rawness we haven’t seen from him in well over a decade, a more mature but still destructive brand of teeth-clenching jealousy and self-loathing that made him Oscar-nominated for The Social Network. However, it is Culkin’s turn that makes the movie glow with compassion. Hot off of his devastating, now Emmy-winning work on Succession, the actor brings the same hyperactive energy to a similarly pitiable manchild who is far more likable but (somehow) even more lovable. His disarming, personable interactions with many of the cast’s supporting players (notably Will Sharpe as their tour guide and Jennifer Gray as a freshly divorced older woman) make you believe that he’s simply too good for this earth, but as the film progresses – airing his dirty laundry in the process – it becomes clear that he harbors a deep instability brought upon by loneliness and depression, conveyed all in Culkin’s ocean eyes.

If all of this wasn’t enough – we haven’t even covered Michał Dymek’s observational cinematography or the inspired Chopin soundtrack – Eisenberg’s dual character study is wrapped in a beautiful Jewish bow, propped by an examination of how little millennial Jews fully internalize their grandparents’ legacy as holocaust survivors. At the beginning of the film, there is a distance between David and his grandmother’s experiences; he treats them with gravity, yet has little insight into what they were. Benji is closer with the deceased and, thus, self-righteous toward the larger group about making their experience reflective and meaningful. All of this comes to a head in a sequence that is incredibly quiet but also is, by all accounts, the emotional climax; the group tours Majdanek, Poland’s most well-preserved concentration camp down to the gas chambers and crematorium. With no dialogue, we watch David and Benji directly confront their grandmother’s history in a way that directly immerses them in the horrors. Both characters are centered by the experience, shedding enough skin to confront their own interpersonal traumas. This stripped-down, if almost too succinct portrait of modern American Jewry makes A Real Pain not just an early highlight of 2024, but an essential piece of Jewish cinema.

A Real Pain held its World Premiere as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The film will be released by Searchlight Pictures at a date not yet announced.

Director: Jesse Eisenberg

Writer: Jesse Eisenberg

Rated: NR

Runtime: 90m