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

Belief

Community

Culture

Music

15 July 2025

1 min read

Oasis: it's all gone a bit biblical at this summer’s musical moments

We’re reaching for some ancient vocab to describe our experiences together

Belle Tindall

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

A silhouette of a musician holding up shakers.

'Cast no shadow'.

x.com/oasis

A biblical narrative keeps whirring around my mind.

In the first century, Paul – planter of churches, writer of letters, spreader of the way of Jesus – finds himself in Athens, the Graeco-Roman city where meaning is made. He wanders around this city, soaking up its culture, noticing its priorities, watching its habits. But he doesn’t do so silently. Paul pulls out his usual party trick; yelling about Jesus here, there, and pretty much everywhere, eventually catching the attention of the local philosophers. They want to hear more, and Paul finds himself thrown in front of the Areopagus, the meaning-making council at the heart of the meaning-making city. The cultural epicentre of the Graeco-Roman world, one could argue.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Paul gets to his feet and unleashes a monologue for the ages, kicking off with this line: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious…’

Quite the opener, isn’t it?

It’s that opening line that my imagination seems to have gotten snagged on.

There is so much going on around me – right here and right now, in 2025 - that makes me want to find a place into which I can scream the exact same thing. There and then, here and now, I can see that in every way we are very bloomin’ religious.

What Paul and I don’t mean by such an assertion is that everyone our contexts are signed up – hook, line, and sinker - to an organised religion. Such an assertion would be silly, considering the data tells a different story. What I’m pretty sure Paul meant, and what I know I mean is this – in every kind of way, people are searching for that which is bigger, deeper, truer than ourselves. We are directing our attention, our energy, our worship in certain directions. We are seeking ritual and practice, wrapping ourselves in stories that give meaning to our day-in-day-out experiences, stories that tie our lived reality into something that transcends it. We’re grasping for a world that is more full of beauty, truth, and sense than we imagined; pledging allegiance to our inkling that there is something more. Yup. In every way, we, the good old human race, are very religious.

Paul said it with his chest then, I think he’d say it with his chest now.

There are a hundred different places that I could go in order to pluck some ripe evidence for my theory – but for now, my evidence of choice is the language being used to describe the long-awaited Oasis reunion.

‘Biblical’

That’s the word being used – in national headlines and personal Instagram captions alike, ‘biblical’ is the adjective of choice.

Isn’t that strange?

I don’t really know what people mean by it, to be honest. According to my research, they’re taking their cue from Liam Gallagher himself, who was the first to describe the band as such. Stay humble, Liam.

Is using ‘biblical’ as the descriptor of choice a reference to the reconciliation of warring brothers? That’s certainly a biblical motif, which I guess is being played out in real-time, witnessed by those who could afford the £400 ticket (no, I’m not bitter). Is it implying that this event is so monumental, it should be canonised somehow? Written about? Memorialised? Poured over for millennia to come? Or is it a reference to the fact that what we are witnessing is the fulfilment of rumours, prophecies, hopes and expectations?

Maybe it’s all of the above, maybe it’s none of the above. It doesn’t really matter. What matters, at least to me, is that people are wanting to express that these gigs are more than the sum of their parts; there’s something transcendent about them, something awe-inspiring, wonder-infusing. Something that feels, dare I say it, religious about them.

It gets even more interesting, because such sentiments aren’t reserved for the reunification of the Mancunian brothers.

I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language.

In a podcast episode recorded in the days leading up to this year’s Glastonbury festival, the DJ and broadcaster, Annie Mac, described the event as ‘communion’, explaining that ‘when you don’t go to church, you need to get that somewhere.’ On the flip side, in the days following the festival, another DJ and broadcaster, Miquita Oliver, teased the endless Glastonbury posts that were filling up her social media feeds – she jokingly stated that ‘it all gets a little churchy after Glastonbury… like “it’s heaven on earth”… can we all relax?’

So, here we have it again – people reaching for religious language to describe significant musical events. Be it the Oasis reunion or Glastonbury – I’m fascinated by the fact that we’re not content with stating that these gigs are merely talented people doing what they do well, and in so doing, giving us an enjoyable time. Such language may be factually accurate, but it doesn’t feel true enough to us. Rather, we’re grappling with the feeling that these events feel like something we were made to experience somehow, they they’re tapping into the deepest parts of us, perhaps?

In the past, I’ve wondered whether this is down to the sense of profound togetherness that these events provide – how they have the ability to remind us that we’re bound to each other, only if for a night. They’re a direct afront to individualism, the biggest and sturdiest lie of our age. I’ve also reflected on the fact that they instil as sense of awe within us: raw awe. An elusive emotion that can be hard to come by, but that we were made to feel. I still think all of that comes into play.

I’ve pondered this a thousand times and yet I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. Nothing else quite hits the spot; nothing else feels quite deep enough, big enough, true enough. Religious references and language, we’re determined to keep them in our repertoire, aren’t we? Our reliance upon them betrays us. Indeed, I’ve come to see our unceasing usage of them as a crack in the façade of disenchantment.

Oh, people of 2025 and beyond, I can see that in every way you are very religious.

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