A Real Pain ending explained: Why does Benji stay at the airport?

One of the films that has emerged as a big player in the ongoing awards season is A Real Pain – even if writer, director and star Jesse Eisenberg admitted that he initially thought his film was going to be terrible.

The film sees Eisenberg star alongside Succession's Kieran Culkin – who has already won a Golden Globe for his performance – as a pair of mismatched, semi-estranged cousins who embark on a tour of Poland to honour their late grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust before emigrating to the US.

Throughout the film, their dynamic is by turns tetchy and tender, leading up to an emotional, bittersweet climax in the final scenes.

Seen the film and need a little help unpacking those final scenes? Read on to have the ending of A Real Pain explained.

A Real Pain ending explained: Why does Benji stay at the airport?

Throughout the film, we are slowly fed more information about the complex relationship between David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), and as the cousins wrestle with their deep-rooted familial trauma, the focus extends to painful memories in the more recent past. Crucially, we learn that Beni had recently attempted suicide, and it becomes increasingly clear that his somewhat brash demeanour is masking a deep vulnerability.

Towards the end of the trip, the pair break off from their main tour group to visit the house their grandmother had lived in before the war. Outside, they decide to lay stones outside the property as a mark of respect – although they are swiftly forced to remove them when the current owners strongly object.

Benji also takes this moment to recount a memory of their grandmother, revealing that she had once slapped him when he had drunkenly arrived late to a dinner. He adds that this was one of few moments in his life that had given him a sense of humility, and that she had been better at disciplining him than anyone else.

When they arrive back home – following an emotional heart-to-heart on their final night – Benji politely declines an invitation to spend dinner with David and his family, which prompts the latter to slap him just as his grandmother did in the earlier anecdote. Benji's response is to laugh, and the reaction from both appears to suggest that they have reconciled some of their differences during the trip after properly opening up to each other for the first time in years.

As David heads off, Benji decides to simply wait in the airport – mirroring the scene from the very beginning of the film when he had been extremely early for the flight.

It's hard to tell exactly what Benji is thinking as he studies various passersby, but it clearly represents a full circle moment from the beginning of the film: he might be in the same physical place, but he has clearly at least made some peace with the issues that had been bothering him, even if he's not quite ready for a family dinner with David.

It is likely that he is simply taking a moment to study people and reflect: on the trip, on his grandmother, on his relationship with David and on his life in general both before and after his suicide attempt.

It's not a dramatic breakthrough moment, and interpretations could vary about exactly why he stays at the airport – some have even suggested he is homeless – but the most obvious interpretation is that he simply needs a little time to process things on his own.

Speaking to Total Film, Eisenberg himself said of the final scenes: "This is a story about how people change and evolve and the way history changes and evolves… It’s the same thing with personal relationships, at some point that thing you want from the other person is not gonna be the thing they’re giving you, and this is kind of what this movie is about.

"They’re going to love each other for ever, but they’re probably not going to be as close as they have been. That’s the feeling of the movie."

He added: "It’s a bittersweet ending and I guess it’s my take on life, which is, there’s a kind of bittersweetness of things. But I think we would have made a lot more money if he [Benji] went home for dinner with me. I was told by a big Hollywood director ‘if you want to make a billion dollars, have him go home at the end’. I was like ‘Yeah, I don’t think I wanna make that movie’."

In other words, it's a grounded, realistic ending that feels true to how the characters would have behaved in real life, rather than opting for a more saccharine, movie magic ending. And it's a decision that works very well for the film indeed.

A Real Pain is now showing in UK cinemas.

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