Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut walks us through memory, grief, and the unresolved distance between family members
Late in A Real Pain, the film offers the hallmarks of an emotional climax. The childhood home of a Holocaust survivor, rediscovered by her two American grandsons. The camera lingers, the characters pause, a symbolic gesture is made. And then—nothing. No cathartis. No monologue. Just a stretch of quiet that first feels unresolved, until you realize it isn’t. The silence is the answer.
Eisenberg, making his directorial debut, shows an unusual restraint here. This film isn’t afraid of emotion, but it refuses to close the loop. The pain remains, sometimes named, often not. It’s there in the silences, in the cutaways, in the occasional missed apology or dissolve to the next scene. The setup is simple. David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins, traveling to Poland to honor their grandmother by retracing her Holocaust survival story. The film opens in a register of light bickering and social awkwardness—airports, jokes, an oddball tour group of New World Jews retracing history through Poland. The early tone suggests we’re in for that kind of melancholy indie comedy that Eisenberg is known for.
But A Real Pain resists tone lock. It keeps stretching. It doesn’t escalate so much as accumulate, layering discomfort, melancholy, and memory until something fragile and honest begins to take shape along the edges.
Much of this comes down to the central performances, both fantastic. Culkin plays Benji as a lovable wreck: brash, unfiltered, self-sabotaging. There’s always danger that this archetype lands awkwardly, either too much of an asshole to be loved or too far redeemed to take seriously as someone still nursing old wounds. Culkin threads something much finer. His emotions are raw and unfiltered, but unequivocally genuine. They don’t help him find answers, just more tension and conflict. He walks this line with strangers, acquaintances, and even David.
Eisenberg is quiet by comparison. David is wound tight, judgmental, well-meaning, but conflicted. But as the trip wears on, we start to see the cracks in his armor, too. Neither man has the full story. They need each other to make sense of their grandmother’s life and death, but can’t quite make the need legible.
The film’s writing is strong, mostly by means of quiet restraint. It is tonally balanced and emotionally precise. But what impresses most is the direction. Eisenberg (writer and director) knows when to stay out of the way. Many of the best moments unfold in medium-long takes, often without score. When the music arrives, it’s Chopin–Polish, melancholy, foundational. The airport bears his name. His work becomes part of the film’s inheritance, another echo carried forward.
A Real Pain isn’t just about inherited trauma—it’s about the inheritance of interpretation. The right to express. Chopin doesn’t simply color the mood; he reasserts the land’s voice, its continuity, its grief and grace carried forward in song. Chopin doesn’t merely score the story, he shares it. Because it’s his story, too.
In a moment of overflowing honesty, David asks his fellow travelers how a Holocaust survivor (his grandmother) begets a suicide attempt (Benji) in two generations. It’s not a joke, but a lamentation. The film holds the question open, against every image and gesture that follows. And while we expect some big emotional tear up between David and Benji, instead we get what so often actually happens in real life: frustration followed by a desperate plea and hopeful assertion that only lingers as the credits roll.
A Real Pain isn’t interested in resolution, but in continuity. These characters aren’t healed by their grandmother’s story. They don’t transmute generational trauma into tidy epiphany. But maybe they understand it a little better through additional context.
At first, the title reads like a joke—a phrase that can point in a dozen directions. But by the end, the light has refracted into something sharp. This isn’t a film about pain that can be fixed or escaped. It’s about the kind that stays with you. The kind that lives in music, in memory, in family—through love or friction. And the choice, always, is to keep walking anyway.
Chopin keeps playing.
The hurt echoes.
And still, we move forward.