Why Jesse Eisenberg's new film hit so close to home: 'You're like the target human being'

While discussing his new film, "A Real Pain," Jesse Eisenberg chuckled, "I should call you the target audience, but you're more like the target human for this movie." The film has garnered significant attention for its profound themes and the outstanding performances of its cast.

In preparation for my interview with writer, director, and star Eisenberg, I watched his latest dramedy in late 2024. I went in almost completely blind, knowing only that it had garnered rave reviews and a fair amount of awards-season buzz (which has now translated into actual awards, thanks to Kieran Culkin’s Golden Globe win). However, I did not anticipate how deeply the film would resonate with me.

For the past few years, my grandmother Edith has been recounting her life story to me. Born into a Polish Jewish family before World War II, her extraordinary life took her from the Warsaw Ghetto to multiple “labor” camps, to liberation, and finally, to settling in Australia. But I never met Edith, who passed away 13 years before I was born. Five years before her death, she recorded her life story on tapes, intending to publish a memoir that never materialized. As the family’s journalist, I am diligently transcribing her words. Hearing her firsthand accounts of life and death struggles has been profoundly moving.

"A Real Pain" follows two very different cousins, David and Benji, on a Holocaust tour of Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother and mend their fractured relationship. Eisenberg has long made a career out of portraying his own brand of neuroses on screen, from the aimless youth in "Adventureland" to Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network." But the anxiety in "A Real Pain" stems from modern characters trying to reconcile their everyday problems with the atrocities of their ancestral history. After a week of friction, the tense but kind David (Eisenberg) and the free-spirited but troubled Benji (Culkin), along with their quirky tour group, visit the Majdanek concentration camp outside the Polish city of Lublin.

As I sat in the dark, empty theater, a thought suddenly flashed through my mind – “Where have I heard of Lublin before?” Then it hit me. I had heard of Lublin not just countless times in my grandmother’s accented, raspy voice, but also on her fourth tape about the SS guards. She described them as overseeing her and other young girls with “big wolf dogs” to ensure they kept pace while carrying pre-made barrels through the camp. Realizing I was likely watching the area my grandmother had described was a surreal feeling.

I had debated whether to include my connection to the film in this article, worried it would make me sound like a narcissistic complainer (which is ironic given the film’s themes). But during the interview, Eisenberg was shocked to hear about the striking coincidence. “As a ‘third-generation Holocaust survivor,’ you’re always asking yourself the same question: ‘Is my pain valid?’ You have this quantifiable horror in your genes, but you’re constantly reminding yourself—being in a relatively free and safe country—that you have not experienced any survival test, and your troubles pale in comparison to your grandparents' experiences.”

Eisenberg's character in "A Real Pain" touches upon this very feeling. In a mid-film monologue, he states that his grandmother survived because of “a thousand miracles,” while her descendants have become an anxious digital marketer and an unemployed waste of space. While Eisenberg’s Polish heritage comes from his father’s side, his maternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from what is now Russia before World War II, having experienced persecution in Moldova. Their experiences instilled a paranoia in their lives, which they passed down to their daughter, Eisenberg’s mother. “My mom used to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, ‘I just had a dream that we were on a boat, and it capsized, and I couldn’t save you… go back to sleep,’” Eisenberg said. “This paranoia gets passed down like cultural paranoia, like ‘something bad is going to happen,’ and then it further validates that we should have this feeling, and we culturally validate each other, and it’s so ingrained in our culture that you can’t shake it.”

But Eisenberg doesn’t make the mistake of letting "A Real Pain" fall into Holocaust reverence. The director expands his own perspective through the character of Elochi, another member of David and Benji’s Polish tour group, who experienced the Rwandan genocide as a young man. “When I walked out of Majdanek, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I can’t believe people would do this to Jews.’ I was thinking, ‘How did humans create systematic, industrialized murder?’” Eisenberg said. “But when I was at the Rwandan genocide museum in Kigali, I was thinking the same thing: ‘How can people do this to each other?’”

Don't let the Holocaust topic lead you to believe that "A Real Pain" is a drama; it's actually a comedy. Culkin's portrayal of Benji is charming, quirky, and hilarious, adding a lively energy to the film. Eisenberg mines the frustration of David realizing he’ll never be as charismatic as his cousin for many of the laughs. “I wrote what I thought was a comedic story, just set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. It’s mostly farcical, satirical bits, but because the backdrop is so serious, it allows for emotional expression,” Eisenberg said.

While comedy came easily to Eisenberg, the scenes set at Majdanek—the German death camp that claimed the lives of thousands of prisoners—brought up the survivor’s guilt once more. “When I was writing the script, suddenly having to set a scene in a concentration camp felt very awkward, because it seemed trivial and cheap to set a scene in a concentration camp,” Eisenberg said. Then his Polish producer told him that filming at Majdanek would be nearly impossible. Since the site remains almost entirely as it was during the war, they often receive requests from production teams hoping to use it as a stand-in for Auschwitz. But most requests are denied by the administrators. They don't want violent scenes filmed at such a somber site. But when the administrators read Eisenberg's script and realized that the story took place in modern-day Majdanek, they gave it the green light. “In the script, after I wrote the exterior scene of Majdanek, I wrote a note to the reader: ‘This scene will look very different. There will be no music, no dialogue… and the shot will be very simple,’” Eisenberg said. “We set up the camera, and I told the actors, ‘Please don’t block each other so we can see all of you. But other than that, do whatever you want. Just walk around.’ And then the actors walked in and saw this stuff for the first time.”

The genuine pain and confusion on the actors’ faces as they took in the camp’s somber grounds—the dingy huts and the cages filled with discarded shoes—was striking. “I don’t know if we did a second take in each room,” Eisenberg admitted. “In the time between scenes, people were very quiet,” Culkin recalled of his time filming at Majdanek.

By the film’s end, Benji and David return home, leaving the feeling that no pain has been resolved. It’s been transformed, displaced, redefined, but it remains. “My friend (director of ‘Zombieland’) Ruben Fleischer saw the movie and said, ‘Do you want to make a billion dollars?’ I said, ‘Oh, sure. What do we do?’ He said, ‘Have Benji knock on David’s apartment door at the end and give a hug, then cut,’” Eisenberg said. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to make a billion dollars.’” “Essentially, it’s a story about David, my character, trying to change his cousin and begging him, ‘Please, please, be the good person I see you as.’ And in the end, he really can’t change him.” “Is David’s general anxiety valid, even if his cousin is going through worse?” Eisenberg posed of the film’s open-ended conclusion. “That’s just the nature of this life. They’re not lives with happy endings because we’re filled with paranoia and terrible traits that are passed down from our mothers who didn’t know how to swim.”

It’s a bittersweet ending that has lingered with me since I left the theater. I can turn off my grandmother’s tapes, and I can walk away from my laptop, but her voice, fighting for survival, still echoes in my ears whenever I complain about some triviality of my privileged life. "A Real Pain" is now playing in theaters.