A Real Pain asks a fundamental question: When is pain not legitimate? Is that even a valid question? Is pain not created equal? Who gets to decide?
The film is strikingly real — no melodrama, no forced emotion. It simply shows life as it is.
The story follows two cousins, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who travel to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother. From the outset, we know the trip will be painful, set against the backdrop of one of history’s greatest horrors — the Holocaust.
David and Benji grew up together but have become vastly different adults. They seem like an unlikely pair, more estranged than connected. Yet, because they are family, they remain tethered to each other, whether they like it or not.
Benji is charismatic and free-spirited, thriving on connection. He is blunt, often to the point of being inconsiderate, disregarding others’ comfort if it means standing by his convictions. When they travel first class on a train, he lashes out — how can they indulge in such luxury when, decades ago, people were herded like cattle to their deaths on these very tracks? To him, the commercialization of remembrance is hypocrisy. But that’s the world now. Benji, unwilling — or unable — to adapt, drifts through life without a stable job, still living in his mother’s basement.
At the gravesite, he clashes with James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide, who recites historical facts while Benji struggles with the weight of the place. James is just doing his job, but Benji can’t stomach the detachment. Did he need to lash out? Maybe. Maybe not. But his reaction highlights the tension between intellectualizing history and feeling its weight.
The dinner scene might be the film’s most dramatic moment. As the group discusses generational progress — how hard labor built a foundation for future privilege — Benji becomes the embodiment of the cycle. The first generation endured hardship. The next reaped the benefits, becoming professionals like doctors or lawyers. Then comes Benji’s generation — privileged and aimless, either artists or bums. And inevitably, the cycle resets. The conversation underscores how privilege shapes people, and how, despite progress, some feel lost.
David, on the other hand, is textbook neurotic — classic Jesse Eisenberg. Unlike Benji, he copes with pain in a high-functioning way, as most do. He works out, takes pills, goes to therapy — modern, capitalist coping mechanisms. He keeps himself busy, convinced his struggles are insignificant compared to his grandmother’s Holocaust trauma. But pain is pain. Does it need to be measured? Must suffering reach a certain threshold to be valid? What about everyday disappointments — the career that didn’t pan out, the relationship that never was?
Benji, for all his charm, is deeply tormented. The happiest, most easygoing people are often the ones in the most pain. He is the brother left behind, stuck in an endless state of transit, hanging around airports — places filled with strangers and fleeting connections. His suicide attempt, the real reason David reaches out for this trip, is a cry for help masked in humor and restlessness. His trauma seeps through not just in his outbursts but in his selective memory of them.
The final airport scene is haunting. Benji isn’t going anywhere — he’s just there, watching, waiting, lost. His expression — a mix of torment and detachment — says everything. This is the scene that will win Kieran Culkin awards. He’s already got the nominations.
The film is a quiet gut punch. The shots make it a proper travel movie, seamlessly interwoven with Chopin. The comedic timing is razor-sharp. And the slap at the end? Perfection.
It is what it is. We just have to get by. How we cope with pain is on us.
