‘A Real Pain’ Review: Heartfelt, Full of Pain, Laced With Humor and Remarkable

The Jewish tradition of placing stones on the grave markers of the deceased as a form of respect and remembrance becomes a central animating force in A Real Pain, the new film written, directed and starring Jesse Eisenberg. While visiting Poland with a Holocaust tour group, cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, respectively) place stones on one of the markers at the country’s oldest gravesites; they try it again at the front entrance of the home where their beloved grandmother grew up, until they are alerted in brusque Polish by a concerned neighbor that an old woman actually lives there now and is likely to trip over the stone and break her neck.  

Eisenberg’s remarkable film—which won Eisenberg the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance earlier this year—is like that mislaid second marker: heartfelt, awkward, full of pain it’s desperate to do something with, and laced with an all-too-necessary mordant humor. It at once recalls the works of Woody Allen, Alexander Payne and, most notably, the comedy of Adam Sandler (Culkin’s live-wire Benji’s too-muchness is an outcome of his outsized anger and vulnerability). But Eisenberg, in his second writer-director effort following 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, has somehow created an of the moment tragicomedy in a style identifiably his own.

Or to put an even finer point: it is identifiably himself. 

The lead characters—the highly-medicated worrywart seller of internet pop-up ads played by Eisenberg and the stoner charm-monster disrupting everything in the search for something genuine embodied with ruthless abandon by Culkin—are like the filmmaker split in two. Watching these two actors bounce off of and grate on each other as they navigate well-appointed hotel rooms, air-conditioned train rides and finally, in absolute silence, the Majdanek concentration camp, is like witnessing a Socratic dialogue if Plato had spent a few seasons writing for SNL.

Filmmaker and actor Will Sharpe delivers a deftly attenuated performance as the well-meaning tour guide with the impossible task of respecting the enormity of what they are there to see while keeping the mood light enough to not be crushing. Like a lost crush from a Catskill’s summer many moons ago, Jennifer Grey turns up on the bus as a recently divorced Los Angelino looking for meaning in her life. Kurt Egyiawan, a child soldier in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2015 war film Beasts of No Nation, plays a Rwanda genocide survivor who turned to Judaism as a way to connect with and process his own trauma.

Eisenberg seems incapable of an inauthentic moment, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that nearly everything he does as an actor, writer and now director confronts the sheer impossibility of achieving anything approaching authenticity. But his deftest act as a filmmaker may be simply handing the ball off to Culkin and clearing a hole so he can run with it. Like a one-winged bird forever trying to escape a cage of its own construction, the Emmy-winning Succession star thrashes, soars and crashes with a breathtaking transparency. 

Admittedly, A Real Pain is an acquired taste; like a top-flight IPA, it is at once overly aggressive and serenely balanced. As a director, Eisenberg holds a preternatural understanding of when to exhale when it all gets to be too much, whether it’s Benji’s antics, David’s brittleness or the enormity of the Holocaust.   

Like several of the year’s very best films—including Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist and Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, a recreation of how ABC Sports covered the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics—A Real Pain demonstrates how we can and must reconcile with the forever festering wounds of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in dynamic ways and with distinct styles. It has never been a more crucial time to listen to and engage with those stories.