Yes – everything could have gone wrong. So the first wonder about “A Real Pain,” writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s remarkably successful film about mismatched cousins ​​on a melancholy journey through Poland, is how it pulls off the most delicate of balancing acts.

That it does so while also asking interesting questions about the nature of pain – personal versus universal, historical versus contemporary – is even more impressive. In fact, it delivers an Oscar-worthy performance.

That brilliant performance comes from Kieran Culkin, and most importantly it doesn’t overshadow the rest of the cast. It’s largely a testament to the careful way Eisenberg, who co-stars in a less flashy role, has constructed and paced his film. And as for Culkin, well, if you needed proof that his Emmy-winning work as the tortured live-wire Roman Roy in “Succession” wasn’t a fluke, there you have it. Have taken.

The film, which marks Eisenberg’s second directorial effort, is based on the “Social Network” star’s visit to Poland nearly 20 years ago. There, she finds the small house in which her aunt lived, before the family was uprooted by the Holocaust. He wondered what his own life would have been like if World War II had not happened.

And this is one of many conversations that David and Benji had as they traveled through Poland on a mission to visit the house where their grandmother, who recently died, once lived.

It’s a touching but awkward reunion for cousins ​​who were close as youth but are on very different paths as adults approaching 40. David is the anxiety-ridden but highly functional type of person at which the Eisenberg actor excels; He works in tech and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young son. As for Benji, he lives in a suburban area that is largely raw or undeveloped. He also studies contradictions, David says – the kind who can light up a room as soon as they enter, and then turn everyone off. The death of his grandmother, with whom Benjy was close, has had a profound impact on his mental health.

The cousins ​​met for the first time at a New York airport. Before they go through security, Benjy scares David by telling him that he has secured some very nice hay for the trip.

In Warsaw, they meet their small tour group and their British guide James, a scholar of wartime Poland. Fellow travelers include Marsha, a divorcee who has moved east from LA and is trying to reconnect with her past; a Midwestern couple; and Eloge, a Rwandan-Canadian converted to Jewsim who knows something about the genocide.

In short, Benjy both fascinates and irritates the group – and this unsettling brand of charisma is Culkin’s specialty.

Near a war memorial statue, he rushes to strike a playful action pose, embarrassing David. But somehow, the whole group joins in with Benjy in childlike stunts, and David leaves to take pictures.

Then when the tour boards the train to Lublin, Benjy suddenly becomes angry at the group – how can they be sitting in first-class comfort while, 80 years earlier, their ancestors were crammed into cattle cars? He disappears in a low class car.

And during a visit to a wartime gravesite, Benjy angrily scolds the mild-mannered guide for focusing on statistics and not allowing the group to feel the pure emotion of the moment.

Eisenberg has said that when conceiving his film, he was influenced by a Polish advertisement that promised “Holocaust Tours”, all of these moments seem quite real; Such tours are indeed full of strange combinations of modern tourist comforts and historical horrors.

Speaking of horror, the toughest scene so far comes when the group visits the Nazi camp Majdanek. There, they pass through indescribable scenes of gas chambers and ovens and piles of abandoned shoes. At first one might gasp that Eisenberg is leading us here; Wisely, he keeps these moments quiet. When Benjy breaks down, he is on the way home – an acknowledgment that such reactions often come later.

At the end, when the cousins ​​are anxiously bidding goodbye at the same airport from where we started after completing both the physical and personal journey, it is difficult to think of the title of the film. Yes, Benji is “a real pain”. But layers of pain are at play here.

This is David’s very real pain, an anxiety that forces him to take pills every day. This is Benji’s pain, which had landed him in a very dangerous situation some time ago.

But, Eisenberg seems to be asking how “legitimate” such pain is in the face of the historical pain that the film highlights in Poland – a place where, as his camera pans across the empty streets, where Once a lifetime was over, an entire people was wiped out by the Nazis?

That’s quite a long journey for a film. Full credit goes to Eisenberg and his brilliant co-star for making the road trip so thought-provoking.

Searchlight Pictures’ release “A Real Pain” is rated “R” by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and some drug use.” “Running time: 90 minutes. Three out of four stars.

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