COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 30min
STARRING: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin
Face to face: from left, Culkin and Eisenberg
David Kaplan (writer-director Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Succession’s Culkin, mercurial and phenomenal) have travelled to Poland to honour the fighting spirit of their late, Holocaust-surviving, grandmother. Their act of faith is set to be a stress test: not only have the cousins’ once-entwined lives veered in diametrically opposed directions but they couldn’t be more of a contrast personality-wise, with family man David a fussbudget and lone wolf Benji a hyperbolic explosion.
The Holocaust tour group that the two have joined is another mixed bag. British academic James (Will Sharpe) is the group’s empathic, non-Jewish leader. Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose mother survived the concentration camps, is struggling to move forward, post-divorce. Diane and Mark (Lisa Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes) are “boring” retirees, while mild-mannered Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) is a Rwandan genocide survivor and a convert to Judaism.
“This,” James informs his disparate crew, “will be a tour about pain.” Amen to that. Eisenberg’s sophomore film-making feature (his follow-up to 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World ) is a paradoxically wacky heartbreaker.
The expedition starts out sombre at the Warsaw Ghetto wall. Before the day is over, however, Benji has worked his exuberant magic, roping everyone but photographer-by-default David into loopy selfies. He’s a live wire and a hoot, yet from where David is uneasily standing — right beside him, 24/7 — his ramped emotions and the treacherous current that roils beneath them are a recipe for anxiety.
As the tour progresses, Benji’s bumptious lack of filter is increasingly triggering. David, adoring and despairing in equal measure, is nervous wreck-adjacent by the time the group arrives at the Majdanek concentration camp (where even Benji is silent), after which the cousins take off alone to their grandmother’s former house and David continues to wrestle with the impenetrable.
“[Y]ou light up a room and then you like shit on everything inside of it,” he pleads with Benji, who for once has no pithy response. The realisation that some questions can never be answered strikes the saddest chord of all in this deeply felt reading of an essentially unknowable soul.
