A Real Pain (15)
Directed by Jesse Eisenberg

 
THIS is actor turned writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s second film and it is a complex dramedy which is in part a buddy road-trip comedy that deals with third generation Holocaust trauma as Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors deal with pain and guilt.

The film follows two US cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), complete opposites who were once joined at the hip and who reunite to travel to Poland to honour their beloved late grandmother who survived the Holocaust and escaped to the US. 

The pair embark on a tour of Polish Holocaust history led by the affable James (Will Sharpe) with a group of strangers (which includes Jennifer Grey) also trying to explore their own Jewish roots. 

David is very reserved, suffers from OCD and misses his wife, whereas young son Benji is a free spirit with no filter. He is unpredictable, enthusiastic and charming one moment and moody and sarcastic the next.

He is triggered during a train journey to Lublin and verbally attacks the tour group. He can’t reconcile the fact they are in first class eating lovely food while Jewish prisoners during the war travelled like cattle in the back of the train as they were shipped off to concentration camps. 

The title seems to refer to Benji who is a real pain but who is also suffering a real pain: the loss of his gran, his best friend and his biggest champion. There is more to Benji than meets the eye and Culkin gives a tour de force performance, stealing the film and earning a Golden Globe. 

Eisenberg and Culkin are a joy to watch as they make an adorable and hilarious double act and odd couple. The humour comes from their constant bickering and acerbic banter. 

Eisenberg, who acted as producer alongside Emma Stone, masterfully balances the comedy with the pathos and the horror of the Holocaust. It will make you laugh and cry. The scenes at the less well-known former concentration camp Majdanek, five minutes from Lublin city centre, are very sobering. 

The film, which was inspired by Eisenberg’s own trip to Poland and his Polish family history, asks whose pain is greater or more real: David and Benji’s or that of the Holocaust.

It is a beautiful film, both funny and terribly poignant as the cousins reconcile and begin to heal.

In cinemas now.