‘A Real Pain’ movie review: A show-stealing Kieran Culkin anchors Jesse Eisenberg’s tender comedy-drama

Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain explores intergenerational trauma and survivor's guilt in a darkly comic, weighty meditation on grief.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain begins and ends with Kieran Culkin’s face, taut with unresolved grief, eyes heavy with the weight of something unspeakable. The familiar wild-eyed Roman Roy charm and boyish smirk give way, by the film’s final moments, to a visage drained of its usual buoyancy. The stillness of his face is a portrait of trapped grief that summarises the film’s thesis: history doesn’t tidy up your mess. In a Holocaust film that, refreshingly, doesn’t grovel for sanctimony, Eisenberg delivers something far more subversive — a darkly comic, deceptively weighty meditation on intergenerational trauma and the ridiculousness of pushing through survivor’s guilt.

It follows David (played with his trademark tic-filled brilliance by Eisenberg himself), a tightly wound New Yorker selling digital ad space, and his cousin Benji, an unmoored, live-wire charmer who appears allergic to adulthood. Their grandmother’s death sends the cousins to Poland, ostensibly to honour her memory by reconnecting with their Jewish roots. What soon unfolds is a chaotic road trip laced with gallows humor, simmering resentment, and the kind of small epiphanies you might find in a Linklater flick.

Eisenberg’s script is sharp, self-aware, and thrives on contrasts. David and Benji are opposites in every sense — the former is all twitchy restraint, a man who apologizes for existing, while the latter is an agent of chaos who breezes through life on impulse and his volcanic charm. Their dynamic is hilariously volatile, yet painfully tender, and together, they’re a combustible duo — a Mobius strip of mutual annoyance and unspoken affection.

A frontrunner for the Oscar this year, Culkin unsurprisingly steals the show. His Benji is a study in contradictions: charming but insufferable, gregarious yet deeply sad. Whether air-mailing weed to their Polish hotel or spontaneously breaking out into a rowdy piano sing-along, Benji’s antics belie a deep well of melancholy as Culkin unspools before our eyes. It’s the volatility of his Succession days — his ability to swing from manic energy to soul-crushing vulnerability — that makes him so magnetic. 

The Holocaust, of course, looms large over their journey, though Eisenberg is careful not to opt for a myopic lens to explore its history. The cousins join a tour group through Poland, led by Will Sharpe’s well-meaning but overly verbose guide and populated by a handful of fellow seekers: an L.A. divorcee, a Rwandan genocide survivor turned Jew-by-choice; and a stoic older couple. Together, they shuffle from one historical site to the next: a Warsaw monument here, a pre-war Jewish district there, and finally Majdanek, where the Zyklon B-streaked walls stand as silent witnesses to horrors most of us can barely fathom.

It’s here that the film reveals its hand. Eisenberg deftly avoids the pitfalls of most Holocaust films, sidestepping melodrama and didacticism in favor of something quieter, more introspective. Though devastating, the visit to the camp is not a climax but a moment of muted reverence, the enormity of its horrors left to linger unspoken. It’s an unvarnished reminder of how small David, Benji and all of us really are in the shadows of the past.

The film captures Poland with a documentarian’s eye for the unsentimental: graffiti-scrawled walls, drab Communist architecture, the quiet of train tracks that once carried lives to their end. These landscapes feel as haunted as the characters now navigating them, and cinematographer Michał Dymek captures that essence poignantly. Even Chopin’s himself, scattered throughout the film, doesn’t really feel like a tribute to Polish heritage; rather, an elegy for something lost.