90 min | R | November 1, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures
Jesse Eisenberg writes and directs a film about two cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Kieran Culkin gives the performance of his career. Ninety minutes. Not a wasted frame.
David and Benji are cousins who were once close and are no longer. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust and recently died. She left them money to take a heritage tour of Poland. David is anxious and careful and married with a child. Benji is charismatic and volatile and alone. They join a small group tour that visits sites of Jewish history and Holocaust memory. Jesse Eisenberg structures the film as a road trip through grief and family resentment. The tour provides the framework. The cousins provide the conflict. Poland provides the weight. Eisenberg understands that the Holocaust is not the subject. The subject is how two living people carry the inherited pain of people they loved.
Kieran Culkin plays Benji with a magnetism that is impossible to look away from. He is funny and warm and infuriating and deeply damaged. Culkin walks into rooms and takes them over. He says the wrong thing at the right time. He says the right thing at the wrong time. He hugs strangers and means it. He picks fights and means those too. The performance is a high-wire act of charm and self-destruction. Jesse Eisenberg plays David as the responsible cousin who resents Benji for being loved more despite trying less. Eisenberg gives himself the harder, quieter role and plays it with precision. Will Sharpe plays the tour guide with gentle authority. Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes populate the tour group with distinct personalities and unexpected depth.
Eisenberg the director keeps the film visually simple and lets the locations do the work. The Polish landscapes and cityscapes are shot with a clarity that respects their history without aestheticizing it. The tour stops at synagogues and cemeteries and concentration camps. The camera observes. It does not editorialize. The film is ninety minutes long and the economy is its greatest technical achievement. Every scene advances character or theme or both. There is no padding. The score is minimal. The sound design uses ambient noise to ground every scene in physical reality. The editing moves with the rhythm of conversation.
The film builds to a confrontation between the cousins that is devastating because Eisenberg earns it through ninety minutes of accumulated tension and affection. David says what he has been holding back. Benji hears it and cannot process it. The scene is played in a single location with minimal coverage and it works because Culkin and Eisenberg have built these characters through every previous interaction. Eisenberg has made a film about the impossibility of sharing grief equally. David carries it as obligation. Benji carries it as identity. Neither approach works. Both are real. The film does not choose a side and that refusal is its deepest act of empathy.