Nearly everyone knows a person like the character Kieran Culkin plays in A Real Pain, the story of two cousins who trek to Poland to connect with their Jewish roots, and with the past of the grandmother they’ve recently lost. Culkin plays Benji Kaplan, a likable layabout who comes off as loose-limbed and laid back, the kind of guy who thinks nothing of advancing a brick of marijuana to his hotel; upon check-in, he picks it up as if it were no big deal. His cousin David—played by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film—lives in New York with his wife and young son; he toils away without complaint at a job in digital advertising. He and Benji used to be extremely close, but they’ve grown apart. David, high strung and dutiful, is leading the life of a responsible adult. Benji lives in Binghamton and, it’s suggested, hasn’t had a job in forever. But somehow he gets by—his gregarious charm doesn’t hurt. He’s the kind of guy who’ll commandeer the piano at a snoozy lounge bar and get the whole gang singing along in a heartbeat.
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Yet anyone who looks closely can see that Benji feels things too intensely—his emotions are so raw they practically vibrate beneath his skin. He both infuriates and endears himself to those who care about him, and there’s perhaps no living person who cares about him more than David. A Real Pain is a road-trip comedy, an observant study of the jangly bonds that keep families together, and a rumination on how events we didn’t even live through ourselves can nevertheless mark us forever. It’s also just a movie about the deep, untouchable sadness in some people, the kind of picture no one could ever teach you how to make. Somehow, it just sprang from Eisenberg’s heart and quietly formidable brain, and the effect is close to miraculous.
Read more: How Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Made a Different Kind of Holocaust Movie
A Real Pain starts out as a comic ramble. David and Benji are traveling from their respective homes to meet at the airport. Jittery and obsessive, David leaves one phone message after another for Benji, clearly worried his cousin won’t show up on time. When David arrives at the airport, Benji is already there, having arrived hours before—he likes hanging out in airports, chatting with random people. Benji isn’t predictably unreliable; he’s unreliably unreliable, which means that sometimes you can trust him to show up and sometimes you can’t.
Once they’re in Poland, David and Benji will join a tour group—it’s led by an extremely knowledgeable but perhaps overly talkative guide (Will Sharpe) and includes a recent divorcee seeking to reconnect not just with her past but with a self she seems to have lost (Jennifer Grey), an older couple who are doing the kind of serious traveling that older couples often do (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), and, perhaps most moving of all, a man who escaped the Rwandan genocide and has since converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan.) The tour will start in the quaint town of Lublin. But the group will also visit Majdanek Concentration Camp, and that, for obvious reasons, will be the toughest day. David and Benji’s grandmother had somehow survived internment in that camp, later emigrating to the United States. David misses his grandmother, but it becomes clear that her death nearly shattered Benji. She was his favorite person in the world and, possibly, the only thing tethering him to it.
There’s lots of ramshackle comedy in A Real Pain: Eisenberg and Culkin are wonderful together—they spar and tumble like kittens playing with a ball. The movie is so entertaining that you barely notice the melancholy shadow that starts to creep over it; that’s when you realize you’re in the hands of an expert but decidedly unshowy filmmaker. This is Eisenberg’s second film—his first was 2022’s heartfelt but uneven When You Finish Saving the World. He’s also a playwright (The Revisionist, The Spoils), and he’s published a book of stories, Bream Gives Me Hiccups. Sometimes, people who try their hand at too many things do few of them well. But Eisenberg, it seems, has so many ideas—so much intellectual exuberance—that he just can’t stop himself. And if you come up with just one film like A Real Pain, you’re clearly doing something right.
What’s most wonderful about the movie is its radiant generosity. Eisenberg’s performance is terrific, muted and hyperkinetic in all the right ways. But most often, he’s subtly directing attention to his co-star. Culkin is extraordinary. His Benji is full of beans, often blurting out the wrong thing that somehow, mysteriously, ends up being the right thing. “Davers and I are cousins!” he announces brightly to the other members of the tour group during their first meeting, and we can feel Dave’s conflicted discomfort. Sometimes he cringes at Benji’s crazed buoyancy, especially when his cousin uses it as a kind of weapon: “You used to feel everything, man,” Benji tells him, a comment that comes with a twinge of passive-aggressiveness. But he’s also kind of right. Dave has forgotten the joy of spontaneity; Benji brings it back.
But Culkin also shows us that Benji is pinwheeling through the world as if to shake off the unnamable sorrow deep within. Some people feel too much, while others don’t feel enough. How can we balance out that inequity? How do we treat those who bear the heaviest load with kindness? A Real Pain suggests that it’s not as easy at looks. But it’s the least, and the most, we can do.