Ivan Radford | On 22, Mar 2025

Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan
Certificate: 15

“My pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the ned to burden everybody with, you know?” What is pain? Is it a burden? Is it something to carry ourselves? It is something to weigh others down with? Is it something we should talk about or try to ignore? Is there such a thing as “exceptional” pain? Is all pain unexceptional? These are the kind of questions that Jesse Eisenberg’s accomplished second film as a director asks. They’re big, heavy questions to grapple with – and it’s testament to how good A Real Pain is that you spend so much of it laughing.

The comedy – for that is probably the most accurate description – follows two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who have grown apart but reunite for a Polish road trip. Wanting to honour their late grandmother, they go on a Holocaust tour, as well as a stop by her old house. It’s a venture as awkward as the phrase “Holocaust tour” suggests, and Eisenberg’s pin-sharp script acknowledges that uncomfortable prickliness explicitly. It’s a chamber piece of juxtapositions, as the past and the present collide, merge and inform each other, just as David and Benji irritate, comfort and better each other.

From the off, their differing personalities are evident just from how their interact with their tour group – and their tour guide, played with immaculate nervousness by Will Sharpe. David hangs back on the fringe and avoids talking to people, while Benji dives in and chats to anyone about anything. While people forget David, Benji is hard to forget.

The same is true of the performances. Kieran Culkin is exceptional as the louder-than-life Benji, whose presence is so restless that no part of his body, including his face, ever stays still. He’s so free-spirited that it’s disarming, and Culkin’s ability to inhabit a character so naturally that he’s not even acting is a perfect channel for Benji’s frank, often profane commentary – he’s charming in his childlike humour and openness, even though that same lack of filter can also lead to unexpected outbursts. His amusingly unpredictable interactions with the rest of the group – including Jennifer Grey as a reserved divorcee and Kurt Egyiawan as a thoughtful Rwandan Jewish convert – turn what begins as a two-hander into an ensemble piece.

None of this would work without Jesse Eisenberg, who delivers a beautifully generous turn. Just as David shrinks back from the word, Eisenberg lets Culkin’s Benji steal the show – until one late monologue that’s dispatched with heart-wrenching precision and completely flips our perspective on them both. The duo are tied together by their family and their heritage, yet the distance between them is one of mismatched memories of their relationships and their pasts. The thing they share above all is a raw honesty, at first about each other and – as the film quietens into a moment of heartbreaking solitude – ultimately themselves.

Eisenberg’s script is, on the surface, a pensive exploration of generational trauma, but underneath that is a probing study of male friendship packed into a taut, almost breezy 90 minutes. It’s a funny, sad and gorgeously vulnerable tale of connection and compassion – of pain that is understood and bourne graciously by those who share it, and pain that is unspoken and lingers weightily amid loneliness. What an exceptional film this is.

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