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

Jesse Eisenberg’s a real pain It begins and ends with Kieran Culkin’s face, taut with unresolved grief, eyes heavy with the burden of something unspeakable. Roman Roy’s familiar wild-eyed charm and boyish smile transforms into his usual bouncy image by the film’s final moments. The stillness on his face is a portrait of trapped sadness that sums up the film’s thesis: History doesn’t clean up your mess. In a Holocaust film that, refreshingly, doesn’t lament for sanity, Eisenberg offers something more subversive — a darkly comic, deceptively weighty meditation on inter-generational trauma and the ridiculousness of shunning survivor’s guilt. .

It follows David (played by Eisenberg with his trademark tic-filled brilliance), a gravely injured New Yorker who is selling digital ad space, and his cousin Benji, an irreverent, live-wire charmer who is allergic to adulthood. Apparently, follows. The death of their grandmother sent the cousins ​​to Poland, apparently to honor her memory by reconnecting with their Jewish roots. What soon unfolds is a chaotic road trip filled with gallows humor, simmering resentment, and the kind of small incidents you might find in a Linklater flick.

Eisenberg’s script is sharp, self-aware, and thrives on contradictions. David and Benjy are polar opposites in every sense – the first is completely restrained, a man who apologizes for existing, while the second is an agent of chaos who runs a lifetime on impulse and his own volcanic attraction. Their dynamic is hilariously volatile, yet painfully tender, and together, they are a combustible pair – a Mobius strip of mutual irritation and unspoken affection.

Culkin, this year’s Oscar frontrunner, made a surprise win. His Benji is a study in contradictions: charming yet unbearable, affable yet deeply tragic. Whether sending merchandise by airmail to his Polish hotel or spontaneously starting a rowdy piano song, Benjy’s actions belie a deep well of sadness as Culkin uncovers it before our eyes. this is his instability inheritance Day – her ability to move from manic energy to soul-crushing vulnerability – is what makes her so magnetic.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in a scene from ‘A Real Pain’ Photo Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Of course, the Holocaust looms over their journey, though Eisenberg is careful not to choose a myopic lens to explore its history. The cousins ​​join a tour group through Poland, led by Will Sharp’s well-intentioned but excessively loquacious guide and filled with a handful of fellow seekers: an L.A. divorcee, a Rwandan genocide survivor who is Became a Jew by choice; And a quiet old couple. Together, they wander from one historical site to another: a Warsaw memorial here, a pre-war Jewish district there, and finally Majdanek, where Zyklon B-streaked walls stand as silent witness to the horrors , most of us can barely fathom.

This is where the film unfolds. Eisenberg cleverly avoids the pitfalls of most Holocaust films, sidestepping melodrama and preachiness in favor of something quieter, more introspective. While devastating, the visit to the camp is not a climax but rather a moment of silent reverence, the enormity of its horrors left unsaid. It’s a stark reminder of how small David, Benji and we all really are in the shadow of the past.

The film presents Poland in a documentary insensitive manner: the graffiti-scrawled walls, the drab communist architecture, the stillness of the train tracks that once carried lives to their end. These landscapes seem as haunted as the characters now navigating them, and cinematographer Michael Dimeck poignantly captures that essence. Even Chopin himself, scattered throughout the film, doesn’t really feel like an homage to Polish heritage; Rather, an elegy for something lost.

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in a scene from ‘A Real Pain’ Photo Credit: Searchlight Pictures

if there is any flaw in it a real pain, The point is that Eisenberg’s skepticism sometimes overpowers his compassion. The film is so committed to avoiding sentimentality that at times it feels emotionally detached. But maybe that’s the point. Grief, after all, is rarely cinematic; It’s messy, unresolved, and often too esoteric to understand.

Ultimately, the film is not so much a narrative of genocide as it is about its consequences: the ways in which we inherit pain, interpret it, and often fail to make sense of it. It’s about these two men struggling with their own messes, trying and failing to understand the history that dwarfs them.

In its calm glow, a real pain Proves Eisenberg’s worth beyond mastering neurosis – he’s now also a highly empathetic filmmaker. He gives us characters that are extremely human, flawed, funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. In doing so, he reminds us that, although pain is universal, its size and weight are uniquely our own.

A Real Pain is currently playing in theaters