A Real Pain

(Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)

This is a film which moved me to tears through almost the entire runtime, and I think it's a highly relevant film for young, European-diasporic Jews such as myself. It packs a punch in a concise 89 minutes, never rushing nor dragging.

A Real Pain is a sober and empathetic depiction of two emotionally dysfunctional cousins who are foils to eachother. One who expresses his mental illness with sometimes charming and sometimes manic behaviour, and another who fears expression and supresses his emotion.

The film covers diasporic identiy, specifically contemporary, middle-class Jews' relationship to the Holocaust and Europe more broadly. It's an inclusive story which follows a group of foreigners revisiting their heritage on a Holocaust tour of Poland, including two white, older couples, a young African survivior of the Rwandan genocide who's a Jewish convert, and the two main characters.

This film is truly for everyone as it covers the themes of family, mental illness, and grappling with one's heritage, in a way that would appeal to many.

I watched this by myself at Classic Cinemas Elsternwick, and apart from me there were two eldery couples in the theatre. They didn't seem to appreciate the film's crass stoner jokes as much as I did, but they were moved by its more serious and intimate moments of confrontation. The characters of A Real Pain confront eachother as much as they confront their shadow selves.

SIMON OWEN