Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Trauma

9 January 2025

5 min read

The battle between seen and unseen pain

Jesse Eisenberg explores how the generations cope with pain.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two male cousins converse across the aisle of a train.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg.

In today’s ultra-developed world, where technological and medical advances have reached unprecedented heights, suffering remains an unsolved problem. While the World Health Organization claims the successful prevention, elimination, or treatment of more diseases than ever before, it also highlights significant increases in anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders worldwide. This paradox raises questions not only about the root causes of mental health suffering but also about the way we understand its current prevalence and impact. Are today’s struggles any different to those others have experienced before us? Is the pain equally real? As we approach the eightieth anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day, can we truly equate the silent struggles of contemporary emotional health challenges with the unimaginably harrowing experiences of those who endured the worst horrors of war, violence, and genocide?

Jesse Eisenberg dares to tackle these complex questions with his directorial debut, A Real Pain, a masterful exploration of trauma, resilience, and the search for meaning. Co-starring Kieran Culkin in a career-defining performance, the film takes viewers on a journey that is part road trip, part comedy-drama, part historical reflection, and wholly compelling. I believe it offers a timely and deeply thought-provoking challenge to consider how we recognise and process pain across generations as well as understand the way pain shapes – and reshapes – our lives.

In the film, Eisenberg and Culkin portray two estranged Jewish-American cousins, David and Benji, who embark on a shared mission to retrace the steps of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. What begins as a simple road trip to Poland quickly transforms into something much more as the brutal reality of intergenerational trauma and mental health struggles rise to the surface. The film’s themes can be explored through three key lenses: the passing on of pain, the proximity of pain, and the problem of pain.

The passing on of pain

At its heart, A Real Pain is a story about legacy—the burdens and blessings passed down through generations. Though their shared grandmother is no longer alive, her story of survival, resilience, and eventual flourishing has left a profound impact on her descendants. Her story draws the cousins in, but it also draws them together and apart in different ways over the course of the trip. There is tragedy and comedy, and poignant moments of connection as well as frustration as Eisenberg explores how trauma echoes through generations, affecting different people in different ways, weighing heavily on those who did not live through the original events. This theme is handled with nuance showing both the strength and fragility that come from confronting a painful past. Ultimately it brings us to a new question – how do we honour the suffering of those who came before us while also finding our own path, or paths, to healing?

The proximity of pain

As the cousins delve deeper into their family’s history, the film juxtaposes the grandmother’s resilience in the face of antisemitism, war, and Holocaust with Benji’s struggles. Despite severe loss, grief and trauma, the grandmother went on to live a meaningful life. Benji on the other hand struggles to keep on top of his daily responsibilities, hold down a job, and maintain relationships. He struggles to find any meaning in his life and reveals he has attempted suicide. How, he wonders, did his grandmother find the strength to fight for her life against the backdrop of the Holocaust when he can’t even navigate the relative peace of middle-class America? This question seems to add to his despair. He seems thoroughly beaten.

Eisenberg does not provide easy answers but instead invites viewers to wrestle with these complexities of life and death, resilience, and vulnerability. He forces us to confront our assumptions about suffering and strength. By making us reflect on which pain is more real, he seems to have found a way to challenge us both to honour the reality of past trauma and recognise the reality of the struggles faced by those around us. He has certainly found a way to help us empathise both with the millions of people who are currently displaced and traumatised by violence, conflict, and displacement, and, equally, with the millions whose mental health is in tatters.

The problem of pain

At its core, A Real Pain tackles the universal question: what do we do with suffering? Do we bury it in the past? Do we pretend it does not exist? Do we insulate ourselves from the pain of others? Do we respond with frustration and anger or with patience and empathy? Do we accept pain as a tragic by-product of existence? Do we struggle under the burden of it? Do we let it defeat us? Do we find ways to learn from it? Can pain make us stronger? Can it make us better people? Does it point to something deeper within us or, indeed, something beyond us?

Right in the middle of the film, David and Benji meet a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. who provides a stark reminder that the horrors of the Holocaust are not just consigned to history, that even today there are places where entire people groups are being targeted, destroyed, and displaced. This character has clearly found solace and meaning through his faith, in contrast to the cousins’ secular Jewish identities. The tension between belief and unbelief runs through the film and reflects the wider experience of many for whom pain has been a critical factor in their journey either to faith or away from it.

For C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia chronicles who offered spiritual solace to the nation during the Second World War and who was personally familiar with suffering writes: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain, for many Christians like Lewis is supposed to draw us towards faith – it is an urgent invitation to seek meaning and connection in a fractured world. Pain reminds us of our mortality and vulnerability, and our dependence not just on others, but perhaps too on an Almighty being who offers hope, healing and the promise of a life beyond this in a world where there is no more death, no more tears, no more pain.

With A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg has crafted a film that will make you laugh and cry and think and discuss and reach out to others, or even to God. This film invites you to reflect on the past, present and future, to wrestle with the pain we carry and to seek meaning beyond it. It’s a must-watch for anyone who dares to reflect on life’s most profound questions.

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Article

Community

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

2 June 2025

5 min read

Hedgerows are boundaries, but they don’t divide so much as abound

The lines we draw between land and lane connect us.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Down in Devon.

Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

In May and June, the Devon hedgerows that hold the landscape outside my window are at their fullest, most colourful state of being. Walking the narrow lane that runs away from our house means walking between high hedgerows that rise like soft green walls either side, which really, means walking between ancient living things, because these hedgerows are old. Devon has some of the oldest hedgerows in the country, and so the world – older than the Parish churches whose towers I can see to the south, east, and west, which rise like old-growth trees out of a blanket of green fields.

Early Bronze Age farmers had to clear woodland to make their fields, and sometimes they left strips of woodland to mark boundaries. These are our oldest hedgerows. They are often found on parish boundary lines, and can support over 2,000 species, also acting as important wildlife corridors for many of them. To roughly date a hedgerow, you count the number of species in a 30m stretch – one species equals 100 years. I have taken to counting random 30m stretches of the hedges that line the lanes near us, and have concluded that we are surrounded by hundreds, in places thousands of years of history – of braided hawthorn and blackthorn, hazel and oak, pink campion and bluebell whose bulbs hide in ancient earth banks that many of the hedgerows sit on.

Now, in these spring hedges, hawthorn is in blossom, nettles overflow with prickly exuberance, and somewhere deep in the tangle a blackbird tunes its song. The hedges are thick with memory stitched together from centuries of hand-laying, stock-keeping, quiet watching. They are Devon’s old boundaries, but they do not divide so much as abound. Life spills from them: wrens and mice, vetch and violet, and so many more things unseen. These are not just boundaries that mark where other things like fields and roads begin and end then; they are living spaces in their own right. They are pathways for diverse life, they are structures that hold home and shelter, food and safety, they are corridors that contain history and story. They are not just edges, they are the centres of whole lives and worlds.

Walking here one May morning, I find myself wondering about the lines we draw – between land and lane, but also between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and whether these lines too might be porous like the hedgerows, which have lived for so long not through independence but through care and relationship.

The hedges speak paradoxes that I am confronted with every time I go for a walk – of division and abundance, of separateness and connection, of containment and invitation. Lately, I am sitting with these and am coming to understand a threshold that the world offers me: between independence and interdependence. But the truth is I’m not very good at interdependence. I have so often retreated behind the wall of my self-sufficiency, but I am trying to pull that wall down and replace it with a porous and lifegiving hedgerow.

We draw lines – around ourselves, and between people, nations, beliefs, social classes, politics. Sometimes these lines are for safety, sometimes for exclusion. But the hedgerows tell me that it is possible to hold a line and also to let light and life flow through it and shape it. They tell me that these lines are not end points but invitations to communion.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin wrote:

“…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?”

Le Guin’s work of science fiction is about otherness and connectedness, with different species having to learn empathy in order to collaborate and communicate. The darker the events in the book, the brighter the hope and relationship. The book feels like it was written for now, for this world.

On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations.

In a world whose people are persecuted, othered, tired, it is easy to believe that the way of things is division and separation. But hedgerows suggest another way to live: layered, porous, complex and interconnected, creating space not just for encounter but for new life through that encounter. This is how I picture the Kingdom that Jesus speaks about and so often found solace in: a world of intermingling and ever-growing aliveness. I think Jesus would have walked with the hedgerows had he lived in Devon. I think he would have used them to speak of boundary-crossing between heaven and Earth, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile. I think he would have pointed to them and said, see the tangled beauty of these? They are what the Kingdom is like: held and open, living and lifegiving. This is what I want our future to be too.

As I walk these old lanes, I am deepening into my hedgerow apprenticeship. I am learning to sink my roots in, to tend boundaries with care, to make space for life. I am also finding that there is nothing in the hedgerows that speaks of self-sufficiency. These ancient, interwoven green features that have defined this landscape are here because of relationships between species. It is easy to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, it is another thing to try to live it – to live like gifts, reciprocity, community, are things that might take the weight of our time. These old hedgerows give me a foothold though – they enliven the overused but hard-to-live idea of interconnection, they show me what it looks like and that it is an approach to life that is patient, strong, sustaining, real.

When I reach out my hand I can usually find something edible or beautiful in the hedgerow depending on the time of year: blackberry, hazel, oxeye daisy, pennywort, primrose. Yesterday, it was the cow parsley that really caught my attention: its frothing, foaming flourishing. In a few weeks it will give way to what comes next, just as it has always done, just as this world will always do. On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations. I am also in the presence of relationship, and of hope.

Now, with so many crises bearing down on the world, and with anxiety and despair blooming, it is the hedges that remind me of other, older, wiser ways to be. It is the hedges that show me how to root deep into solid ground, and how to reach out to others, and to light, which are so often the same thing.

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