‘A Real Pain’ is a deliberate tonally inconsistent affair which draws on the third generation experience of the Holocaust to offer a sombre, poignant reflection on the way the incomprehensible past impacts on suffering in the present. Specifically, it addresses how the trials and sacrifices made by our ancestors translate into guilt in the present day over how our own relatively petty pains somehow seem less manageable than anything that took place in the death camps, and that this itself simply amplifies the pain – a real pain, indeed, to paraphrase the title – on display.

Two cousins from the US who have largely gone their separate ways go on a tour of Poland to celebrate the life of their recently deceased grandmother, a survivor of the death camps, and we are privy to the impossible-to-distinguish gradation of pains – current day malaise, depression and suicide seen against the backdrop of insurmountable suffering and trauma. In one pivotal scene, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are travelling on a train with their fellow tourists to go on a tour of Majdanek concentration camp, and Benji is struck with guilt at how they are travelling first class, with all the benefits that brings such as food brought to their seats, when, eighty years earlier, their grandmother and others from her generation were forced to travel third class.

It would be too glib to categorize ‘A Real Pain’ as a film which seeks to bring past and present into dialogue, but the underlying motif is one whereby different worlds collide, and they do so in a way that carries into the present vestiges of past, unfinished, even dysfunctional, familial relationships which compound the pain and which beg the question as to whether any of us have the monopoly on pain. Benji is suffering from an unspecified mental illness and is liable to constantly throw out instructions to people, irrespective of whether they want to follow them, as when he inspires the rest of the tour group (and their bemused guide) to clown around at the Warsaw Uprising Memorial, and he seems insensitive to the lack of tact he exhibits. Yet, those around him tend to find his company charming, and they are endeared to him the more he overreaches. He is without a filter and he rises to the highest incline only to plummet to the lowest depths without an in-between.

This is a masterful film which uses comedy as a way to make the Holocaust experience even more profound than if this were done in a strait-laced fashion, and with it a commentary on the evolution of the human spirit over time. At its heart is the question of how our ancestors would feel about the way the grandchildren they so nearly never had are ill-equipped to deal with a life that comes with none of the equivalent ‘real pain’ they underwent in so brutal and malevolent a way, and which is, paradoxically, somehow even harder to cope with. This is the kind of film which hits its mark days afterwards, and it hits the bullseye even though when watching it we may be struck by its irreverence and inconsistency.