Is It Right to Envy Pain?: A Review of A Real Pain (2025)

It’s weird seeing your teacher outside of school. When I saw DC on my way to a movie with my friends, it was a shocking out of body experience that I thought would stick with me for the rest of the day. But then we sat down to watch the movie: A Real Pain, a character driven indie film about two cousins on a holocaust tour of Poland, and all I thought about hours after was this question: can you envy pain? 

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg delivers not just a film but a thesis disguised as a comedy, a travelogue, and a bitter sibling drama. Kerien Culkin, who won an oscar for this role plays Benji, the erratic and emotionally volatile cousin to Eisenberg’s neurotic David. They embark on a Holocaust heritage tour across Eastern Europe, ostensibly to retrace their grandmother’s steps—but for Benji, the journey is about something deeper, more volatile: he wants to feel something real. More specifically, he wants to feel the real pain of the Holocaust. Not just witness it, not just mourn it, but somehow own it.

This premise is both absurd and uncomfortably relatable. In a world of curated suffering—where grief is packaged into social media posts, and virtue signaling has become an Olympic sport—Benji’s desire to truly suffer, to escape the numbing irony of modern life, is both ridiculous and honest. His envy of historical trauma might seem perverse, but it exposes a cultural emptiness that many quietly recognize: the fear that our own pain isn’t "real" enough.

Throughout the tour, Benji lashes out at fellow participants who, to him, perform grief rather than experience it. He mocks them for their quiet politeness, which to Benji, represents their disconnection. An example of this is set on a train between stops on the tour. They are sitting in first class and Benji is bothered by the incongruity that they are Jewish on a train for a holocaust tour and they are sitting in first class. Bothered is less the correct word because as Benji shouts at the other tour members for ignoring the context and enjoying luxuries in the place his ancestors suffered, all I could do is start laughing with my friends. Why laugh? Because to me a train is just a train and the idea of trying to suffer on purpose combined with Culkin’s over the top performance is too funny. This comedic presentation of Benji’s struggle is also shown with a portrayal of the grief that Benji described as sincere and honest as well. It's almost confusing to an audience who wants just a character to cringe at or to root for.  

But in this confusing portrayal of Benji is the central conflict the film centers around: is Benji seeking truth, or is he exploiting someone else’s trauma for moral clout? Is this a quest for empathy, or a form of spiritual colonialism? The film doesn’t hand us easy answers. Instead, it complicates them. His breakdown may be sincere, but it’s still about him. And that’s the trap of trying to "experience" someone else’s pain—it always risks becoming a kind of moral tourism.

So are we supposed to laugh at Benji? Often, yes. His outbursts are cringey, his righteousness self-centered. But we’re also meant to see ourselves in him—the part that’s numb, the part that scrolls through Netflix’s selection of genocide documentaries while eating dinner, the part that craves sincerity in a world that’s forgotten how to grieve properly. And in that way, we do sympathize with him, despite ourselves. 

What I am reminded of walking out of the theater is that saying I hear and laugh too often: “it's not that deep.” We try so hard to be ironic and detached that when we need to be quick to point out when someone cares about something, we can just drop “it's not that deep” to a pattering of chuckles and we move on. A Real Pain wrestles with this not by taking a clear side: Benji isn’t a hero what he does, but he also isn’t fully a clown either. But what the film does do is give more weight to the phrase “it's not that deep”. Because sometimes it isn’t, but sometimes it is: we can’t just assume ironic superiority and move on

A Real Pain is ultimately less about the Holocaust and more about the crisis of modern empathy. It suggests that irony is no longer armor—it’s anesthesia. And in doing so, it offers no answers, only uncomfortable reflections.