A Real Pain opens in theaters November 1. This review is based on a screening at the 62nd New York Film Festival. “This is a tour about pain.
” So says James (Will Sharpe), the guide leading cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) on a Holocaust remembrance tour in A Real Pain. Jesse Eisenberg’s excellent sophomore feature as writer and director is certainly being literal here. By visiting these sites of atrocity in Poland, David and Benji seek to uncover the history they can no longer share with their recently deceased grandmother, one marked by untold and undeserved suffering.
And how could you not take James at his word? A trip to see a concentration camp is going to be filled with sorrow even without the personal connection. All the while, Eisenberg brings us along to ride through the pain that currently exists between David and Benji. We watch as their stark differences – the former put together and kind but ultimately a boring pushover, the latter an undeniably charming mess of a person – bubble up to the surface over the course of a few days spent steeping in the Holocaust and their family history with its impact in Poland.
That friction reveals that even family members can only hope to be tourists in each other’s worlds, and that there’s only so much we can do to help our loved ones carry on. With a quiet and confident strength, A Real Pain smartly questions what it means to honor those we’ve lost and the crushing agony of that .