Sundance ’24: ‘A REAL PAIN’ Interrogates The Overlap Between Individual and Family Trauma

Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s tender sophomore feature A Real Pain. A poignant meditation on loss, grief, and family history that’s part autobiographical and entirely heartfelt, Eisenberg has seemingly found his grove as a creator interested in melding melancholic human stories with relationship-driven good humor. “Anything that I’ve written that’s good is very personal,” Eisenberg shared at the premiere and with A Real Pain, he’s excavated situations and characters from his own life and translated them into a good-natured and provocative little drama with wide-reaching appeal.

The story begins (and ends) in an airport with a tight closeup on Kieran Culkin’s Benji. His cousin, David (Eisenberg) is frantically trying to reach him, unaware that Benji arrived hours earlier. Neurotic and careful, David wants to ensure that they’ll make their flight to Poland, where the pair has enrolled in a cultural tour to reconnect with their familial and cultural history after the passing of their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. On the ground in Warsaw, they meet an ensemble of unlikely fellow travelers and their not-so-fun-fact-filled tour guide played by The White Lotus’ Will Sharpe, each on this Polish excursion for the own deeply personal, often religious, reasons.

Speaking to weighty themes without being pretentious or cold is Eisenberg’s stated objective, which can be hard for a performer who naturally appears pretentious and cold, but his ticky neuroticism is balanced out by Culkin’s natural magnetism. As Benji, Culkin is a grinning wrecking ball of a man-child. Charming but troubled, he waffles between being an inviting and open people person and an easily irritated pest. Being around Benji is an exercise in whiplash, especially so for David who is the subject of Benji’s affable praise one moment and his scornful derision the next.

The duo represent a clash of personas; the turbulence betwixt careful planning and magnanimous anarchism. The friction that exists between the cousins is as palpable as the love shared and Eisenberg and Culkin have natural chemistry, despite the fact that Culkin evidently refused to rehearse and showed up to set not having learned his lines. In this capacity, the overlap between fact and fiction extends beyond the page. Although Eisenberg’s turn is welcome, it’s a familiar playing to type kind of role. Although Culkin is playing in a familiar wheelhouse as Benji, channeling the same hangdog chaos energy of Roman Roy, this is an impressive transition into feature film, especially on the heels of his multitudinous recent awards win. When Benji and David visit a Polish concentration camp, the long-awaited silence is deafening, broken only by the tears that follow.

The film’s title cleverly refers to the shared historical trauma of the Jewish people, the individual pain of losing their grandmother, and Kieran’s character who is, in addition to being gratingly honest and utterly charming, a true pain in the ass. A Real Pain contends with the fact that pain is simultaneously universal, it’s not special or remarkable or unique. And yet it needs to be aired out, shared, commiserated with. In darkness, pain festers. In silence, trauma recycles. Benji is acutely aware of this fact and draws other people into his pain, often times inappropriately or against their will, as David seeks to repress his own pain to not be a bother. Neither are entirely successful, two uniquely broken halves of a maybe functional whole. Eisenberg, as a director and writer both, doesn’t break a lot of new ground but what he’s achieved is hard to dismiss.

CONCLUSION: Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature ‘A Real Pain’ is an effective character study about two polar opposite cousins that’s warm, funny, and thoughtful. Kieran Culkin and his smug, offhanded charm is the film’s defining high point.