Trauma Becomes a Symptom of the Modern World - A Real Pain

Ioana Satmari • 3/31/2025

Suspended between generations, some traumas are lost in the haze that strangles the ability to convey pain. There are wounds that never heal, only change their form, passed down as an inheritance no one wants. A Real Pain, directed by Jesse Eisenberg, is the echo of suffering, the intertwining of history and identity, the impossible desire to find a place in the past when the present unravels into a faceless estrangement. This treasure-hunt feature satirizes the way we relate to suffering today. Who is allowed to suffer?

How much is too much? We live in an era where trauma is a public discourse, a currency, a calling card. Who is permitted to expose their pain, and who must remain silent? The entire film oscillates between the desire to feel something real and the inability to find meaning in suffering. David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), cousins with Polish roots, embark on a historical tour of Poland to trace their grandmother’s childhood home.

Benji, unpredictable, abrasive, always on the edge of chaos, is brutally honest, incapable of censoring his emotions, visceral, perpetually reacting to everything around him. At his core, he is someone who feels too much, yet because of this excess, he appears shallow. History does not weigh on Benji in a predictable way. He is neither solemn nor reverent. He laughs, provokes, shatters solemnity into pieces. If he is the reckless, unfiltered one, through this lack of inhibition he manages to express something profound about what it means to be human. Meanwhile, David, silent, constrained by the rigidity of his own life, hiding beneath layers of decorum, is passive, rigid, unable to express his emotions. Both are marked by what they witness, but only Benji allows himself to be truly devastated. David, in contrast, is meticulous, conformist, resigned to an immutable fate, tormented by his own restraint. Everything overwhelms him, but only from the inside, because he has learned to be the victim of a conformity that forbids him from revealing even his own sadness. When suffering is passed down through generations, it no longer has a historical shape, it becomes a personal symptom, a way of existing in the world.

But who suffers more authentically? Benji, who explodes in the face of injustice, or David, who suffocates in docile silence? Both are specters of a tragedy that overtook them long ago. Benji bathes in it, performing his pain as an ongoing spectacle. David buries it under a thick layer of decency. But in the end, who is closer to the truth? Trapped between the need to feel and the obligation to function, between authenticity and the social norms dictating how and to what extent we are allowed to suffer, the screenplay intertwines absurd humor with emotional depth.

A Real Pain is about how trauma trickles down from history into the psyche of each generation, about how suffering can dilute, distort, and morph into a symptom of the modern world. Above all, A Real Pain is a film about alienation. Their grandmother’s house, their supposed destination, is not just a ruin, it is a metaphor for that unbearable feeling of no longer belonging, of not even being recognized by the past. And how, sometimes, the one who seems most fragile is actually the most sincere.

With cinematography that avoids the spectacular, the film pulses between irony and melancholy, between laughter and helplessness. Benji dismantles solemnity, provoking, ridiculing, refusing to accept suffering as an obligatory ritual. David withdraws into his crushing silence, letting pain erode the edges of his being. In a world where trauma has become an identity accessory, A Real Pain asks: How much of our suffering is truly ours, and how much is an inheritance we never chose? And more importantly, if pain is all we have left of the past, then who are we without it?