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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Explainer

Belief

Books

Creed

Poetry

23 May 2025

6 min read

Why a book? The words that change the world and me

Living by a literature that’s imbibed in countless cultures.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits on a pier intently reading a book on his lap.

Ben White on Unsplash.

I have a belief system, a story that I live by, a lens through which I perceive the world. That doesn’t make me unusual or in any way different to you – we all have those, whether we’re aware of them or not. What may make me different to you is that mine are primarily explained to me through a book – or, more accurately, a library of sixty-six books – which we call the Bible.

The story that I live by, that I breathe in and out, is bound. It sits within a cover, it moves through pages, it unfolds according to a contents page – it has genre, it has authors, it has punctuation.

And I’ve never really found this odd.

I think it’s because I’m what Charles Taylor would call a ‘storied creature’, my default is to make sense of the world on a largely imaginative level. I’m also quite romantic; poetically inclined, one could say. It sometimes feels as though words flow through my veins – if you were to cut me open, I may just bleed a puddle of my favourite Jane Austen monologues straight onto the floor. And so, my personality happens to lend itself spectacularly well to living my life according to a spiritual, sixty-six book wide, library. I’ve never really had to wrestle with the strangeness of such a thing, I’ve never sat down and stared the oddness of it in the eye, I’ve never even really asked myself (or God): why a book?

I feel I should pause here, and offer a quick Rory Stewart-esque explainer, just so that we’re all on the same page.

What I, and Christians through time and place, call the Bible is an anthology of sixty-six books, written by around forty authors, in three languages, over the span of 1,400-ish years. Within it, one can find poetry, narrative, apocalyptic literature, erotic literature, lists and figures, instructions and explanations. It is – year in and year out – the bestselling book in the world, with over 100 million copies sold or gifted each year. The New York Times Bestseller List actually omits it from its rundown, because otherwise it would always be so boringly there – sitting comfortably right at the top. No other book ever comes close. Words from this anthology of literature are graven into the floors and walls of the Houses of Parliament, they’re woven into almost every work of Shakespeare, they’re spray-painted clumsily onto billboards in the city I call home.

And so, I guess, in one way, the answer to my question – why a book? – is all of that. The peculiar far-reaching resonance of the methodology speaks for itself. I think of Robin Williams’ impassioned monologue in Dead Poets Society…

‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.’

… And I get it. I understand why it was literature that was compiled, why language and words were the tool of choice. For better and for worse, biblical words and ideas have changed the world – they have been ‘the making of the western mind’, just ask Tom Holland. And so, pragmatically, one could argue that the Bible being a book (or a book of books) means that it has successfully imbedded itself in countless cultures, while also transcending them. It’s gone further, lasted longer, sunk deeper than any other form of communication could. Such is the power of words.

But to stop my pondering there feels like I’d be stopping short. I’m not sure that a distant, pragmatic, academic answer is one that I feel satisfied with.

So, this morning, I sat down with a cup of tea, a pen, my notebook, and a newfound curiosity - and I asked myself, and God, why a book?

Why poetry?

Why story?

Why wordplay?

Why have I – an educated, arguably disenchanted, most definitely left-brained, twenty-first century adult - been so willing to let these things mould my interior life? Why am I so moved by them? Moved to action, moved to tears, moved to rage. How can I read something that was written a millennia ago, in a part of the world I have never trod on, and somehow feel as if it is a love letter written exclusively to my own soul?

I think that those are the real questions - the questions to which I have both a thousand and zero answers.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Zero answers, because I fundamentally think that it’s a spiritual thing, a God-designed thing, a thing that sits beyond any explanation I could piece together. The God that I believe exists wants me to know about him, wants me to learn and study, wants me to get glimpses of how thinks, how he works, he feels about me – and you. That’s a wild and wonderous thing. That reality leads me be stunned not only at the methodology, but the desire behind it, as St. Augustine wrote,

‘the whole Bible does nothing but tell of God’s love’.

And so, this literature, to me, is a source of truth, leaning into Iain McGilchrist’s inkling that,

‘the fact that religions and mystical and spiritual traditions have always had to use language in a poetic way doesn’t mean that what they’re talking about is not real, it means it is ultimately real.’

The biblical literature uses words to take us to the edge of them.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Sometimes reading it feels like a balm on my heart, other times it feels like a wrestle in the dirt. But I guess that’s the beauty of it being a book, right? My worldview sits within a piece of literature that is adorned with my scribbles, tear stains, tea spills. A book that meets me every single day, ready to read me as I read it, giving my as many questions as it does answers.

So, why a book? Because now that I think about it, it is odd. The powerful resonance of words for all cultures at all times, perhaps? Or the way that poetry was designed to make a bee line for the deepest parts of us? Or the fact that it is only through language that we can talk about the things that go beyond it?

There are a thousand human-sized answers, if you really need them. I happen to enjoy the mystically-charged zero answers, myself.

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