Finally, a Holocaust Movie That Trusts Us
By now, I hope you have seen A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s feature detailing the relationship and experience of two estranged cousins touring (once) Jewish Poland at the behest and expense of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.
If you have not, let me sell it to you with the observation that sold it for me: a Holocaust movie without any fucking lessons. Life is Beautiful this is not: it’s not even Schindler’s List. Though there is a brief, intense, and appropriately silent excursion to the Majdanek (Lublin) extermination camp, most of the movie’s emotional gravitas comes from the far less industrialized pain the cousins both carry within themselves and inflict on each other.
Indeed, the movie’s title turns on dueling hurt: David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin, a revelation, sweeping his way through awards season) are both experiencing each other as real pains while also seeking to understand “Real Pain”—the kind that their grandmother had thrust upon her during the Shoah, pain that presumably endowed her with sage wisdom and unknowable truths.
As viewers we are privy to David and Benji’s specifically Jewish musings on the nature of Holocaust remembrance, trauma porn, and the usefulness of guided tours through concentration camps. But we are not beaten over the head as an audience with the reminder that the Nazis were bad. We know. They know. They know that there is an unfathomable gulf, on the other side of which lies the things their grandmother saw and carried with her. They want to experience something realer than the narrative undoubtedly handed to them in Hebrew school, since they make a point of noting their grandmother never really spoke about the war.
They want to honor her memory authentically, and yet being in Poland feels a lot like being at home—their petty grievances follow them. They still get on each others’ nerves. They aren’t quite sure how else they’re meant to feel—besides dutifully and ambiently sad.
This was a revelation to me: a movie that manages to ask important questions—and engage with a Holocaust narrative—without feeling like the non-Jews around me are meant to be learning while Jews do the all-important work of Never Forgetting. Benji and David are the descendants of one survivor, whose story of survival is not transferable nor necessarily cinematic. They are, eighty years on, subject to the same frustrations and fears and sorrows that stalk us all—even if their bloodline continued due to a “thousand little miracles,” as David puts his grandmother’s endurance to their broader tour group.
I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of A Real Pain featuring a talk-back with actress Jennifer Grey, who features as another tour group attendee trying to connect with her survivor heritage. One of the questions posed to her by the moderator was if she found shooting in the Majdanek camp to be particularly difficult. She talked about the trust Jesse Eisenberg built with the museum staff, how they shot alone and in total silence, as is depicted in the film. The reactions to the death machines are genuine (how could they not be?).
The heaving sobs Kieran Culkin-as-Benji shed on the bus ride back were real. Perhaps most relevantly, she spoke about the universality of the kind of grief explored in “A Real Pain”—whether that be from Holocaust memory, the death of a grandparent, or the attempted suicide of your beloved cousin. Most of the critiques I have seen levied against “A Real Pain” involve some variation of conveying that Eisenberg’s script ought to have focused on the machinations of the Holocaust more—that we should have known more about their grandmother’s journey out of Poland. But we are all the protagonists of our own life; no matter how long he stares at Majdanek’s former crematorium, what’s really eating David up inside is the knowledge that six months prior to this trip, Benji attempted to take his own life. “How,” he sputters through tears, when his emotions finally catch up to him at dinner with the rest of the tour, “can someone who exists because of a thousands tiny fucking miracles do that to himself?”
The unspoken coda: how could he think he knows real pain? He continues: “I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everyone with it.”
Some experiences are undoubtedly worse than others. But once you are in the territory of grief and pain, it can be hard to measure it. The Holocaust—the lives of every single person who perished in its flames or were spared them by luck—cannot be universalized. You cannot neatly map one kind of grief onto another—if grief is even the right word to attempt to describe a survivor’s relationship to all they experienced. “A Real Pain” takes an approach to storytelling that’s a bulwark against this all too frequent approach.
There is fair critique, I think, that we do not hear much from the other tour group members beyond their initial introductions—including Eloge, a Jewish convert who survived the Rwandan genocide. When he introduces himself this way, Benji lets out a tremendous “No shit!” The clear subtext here: this guy knows pain. And yet: he’s on the same tour as David and Benji, quietly taking in the remnants of the Final Solution and refusing to pit one genocide against another.
Finally, a Holocaust movie that trusts its audience to draw their own conclusions.
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Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler is an LA-based writer and the co-editor of AN AMERICAN GIRL ANTHOLOGY (forthcoming May 2025).
