A Real Pain is a subtle but powerful exploration of remembrance culture and personal trauma

We are constantly confronted by history. The history of our cultures and traditions. Of our families. Of our own personal relationships. Can we – or should we seek to – ever escape the tightly woven net of our preoccupation with our past?

Jesse Eisenberg explores these questions with curiosity, humour and insight in the lightly plotted, semi-road movie A Real Pain. In his second feature as writer-director, he also shows a commendable diffidence when it comes to offering definitive answers.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are 40-something cousins, nearly identical in age. Close in their youth, but they have drifted apart as their lives have taken very different trajectories.

Nerdy, buttoned-down David has settled into a secure, if unremarkable, professional and family life in Brooklyn. Volatile Benji, however, is on a far more precarious path – socially, financially and emotionally. The cousins are reunited for a trip to Poland in memory of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor with whom both, especially Benji, were very close.

The pair book onto a tour conducted by Oxford-educated, non-Jewish guide James (Will Sharpe). They’re joined by Marcia, a freshly divorced “lady who lunches” (Jennifer Grey), retired middle-class couple Mark and Diane (Liza Sadowy and Daniel Oreskes) and Ologe (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

Ologe is the group’s only member with direct personal experience of the horrors of ethnic slaughter. He is iron

It’s one of the film’s many understated ironies that the only convert among the group (the quietly spoken Ologe) is also the most actively engaged by Jewish culture. The born-Jewish Americans, meanwhile, get their heritage “hit” from Holocaust trauma tourism.

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As the film follows the tour’s itinerary through Warsaw, Lublin and the death camp Maidanek, its titular exploration of “realities of pain” starts to crystallise.

At first, pain is filtered by the self-contained nature of modern tourism – no less true of Holocaust tours than the one-percenter hedonism of HBO’s The White Lotus.

In Michal Dymel’s lucid cinematography, shots of the Polish countryside and rail junctions subtly echo the famous topographies of Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece Shoah (1985). But the visible traumas and unhealed wounds Lanzmann recorded in mid-1970s are nowhere to be seen in cosmopolitan contemporary Poland. In their place are Jewish “heritage” restaurants where dinner is served to piano renditions of Hava Nagila, and the dutiful enactment of folk rituals like placing stones at Jewish graves.

Guided by the informed and conscientious yet ultimately detached James, the tourists perform their Jewishness within unstated yet acknowledged limits to their engagement – with Poland, with Jewish history, with each other and indeed with themselves.

Even the horrors of Maidanek seem well-regulated in the camp’s afterlife as a museum, echoing Jonathan Glazer’s similar observation about Auschwitz-Birkenau in last year’s The Zone of Interest.

Benji’s ‘real pain’

Within this muted, routinised remembrance culture, Benji’s unpredictable behaviour starts to detonate small outbreaks of “real pain” which are annoying and upsetting in equal measure.

Benji assigns himself the role of truth-teller, provocateur and agent of catharsis. He challenges James on his fact-heavy, pretentious style. He heaves with sobs after the visit to Maidanek. And in an inspired and hilarious scene, he denounces the moral outrage of Jews enjoying first-class travel on the same railway lines that ferried their forebears to their deaths.

Feeling inescapably implicated in his cousin’s violations of social protocols, David is scandalised. But his mortification turns to bewilderment when Benji’s provocations are indulged and even embraced by the other tour members.

Culkin’s brilliant performance echoes his feral turn as Roman Roy in Succession. But here he adds a layer of genuine empathy that, as David acknowledges, allows Benji to light up a room and have others embrace him almost despite themselves.

As the film progresses, Eisenberg starts subtly to deconstruct the cousins’ dynamic. Benji’s outbursts have an aggressive, destructive edge, especially when directed at David. It’s not clear that his relationship with their grandmother was as straightforwardly loving as he frames it posthumously, perhaps out of need.

Nor is David simply Benji’s dweeby straight man. The depth of conflicted feeling in his helpless love, frustration and anger for his wayward cousin will ring true for anyone who has struggled with a family member battling mental illness.

Here, ultimately, is where we encounter “real pain” in the film. Is David’s quiet anguish somehow less legitimate when juxtaposed with these world-historical monstrosities? Equally, is Benji’s histrionic reaction to Maidanek an authentic expression of mourning, a performance of grief, or an appropriation of collective trauma to channel his own personal suffering?

When, as their last act in Poland, the cousins visit their grandmother’s birthplace and lay rocks on the threshold, a sympathetic yet pragmatic Polish neighbour points out this may pose a hazard to the house’s current elderly resident.

The moment asks which, if either, should take precedence – a violently amputated cultural history to which its inheritors feel a moral duty of remembrance? Or the ongoing needs and demands of the present, which cannot linger indefinitely in history’s dark shadow?

Must different pains compete, or can they somehow help assuage one another? The great strength of Eisenberg’s subtle, understated film is to pose such questions without suggesting, let alone imposing, facile answers.

Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.