By Jason Osiason

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is one of those rare films that deepens on a second viewing. What at first feels like a modest story of two cousins reconnecting on a Holocaust tour in Poland becomes a layered excavation of inherited grief, unresolved family wounds, and the ways history leaves its mark on the present.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its performances. Eisenberg plays David Kaplan, the more reserved cousin, with his familiar restraint, but it’s Kieran Culkin as Benji Kaplan who transforms the film into something extraordinary. His performance is volatile and magnetic, bursting with humor one moment and collapsing into anguish the next. He embodies a man whose grief is too large to contain, whose chaos masks a devastating vulnerability. It’s a performance that feels less like acting than raw exposure, and it’s impossible to look away.

Eisenberg’s direction is equally striking in its refusal to tidy up the mess of memory. He leaves space for silences, for unfinished conversations, for pain that can’t be easily resolved. The film’s incompleteness is its honesty, it mirrors the way trauma lives on, never neatly healed, never neatly closed.

On rewatch, the film’s emotional force was overwhelming. Its heart is enormous, its sadness undeniable, its humanity piercing. Culkin delivers one of the defining performances of the year, the kind of work that stays inside you long after the film ends.

A Real Pain is not just a film about grief, it’s a film about what it means to carry history inside you, and the fragile, imperfect ways we try to connect in spite of it. It is intimate, haunting, and unforgettable. [A-]