A Real Pain (2024)
Kieran Culkin is magnetic in this film. Whatever scene he's in, whatever he's doing, you simply cannot look away from him. That's a good thing, because A Real Pain pretty much lives or dies by whether you buy into his performance, and he more than delivers. Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed, has made a small, thoughtful film about grief and family and the strange guilt that comes with surviving, and it's well worth your time, even if it never quite reaches the heights it occasionally hints at.
The setup is deceptively simple. Two cousins, David and Benji, reconnect after years of drifting apart to honour the memory of their late grandmother. She was a Holocaust survivor, and to pay tribute to her, they join a heritage tour through Poland, visiting the places she came from. It's a premise loaded with emotional and historical weight, and Eisenberg handles it with a lightness of touch that mostly serves the story well. There's a coming-of-age quality to the whole thing, which is a slightly odd thing to say about two men in their late twenties or early thirties, but that's genuinely the vibe it gives off. It's less a criticism than an observation about the specific register the film is working in.
The cousin dynamic is where the film does its best work. Benji is extroverted, unpredictable, the kind of person who'll say the thing everyone else is thinking and somehow get away with it. David is wound tight, socially anxious, the sort of bloke who apologises too much and overthinks everything. Eisenberg is playing a type he knows well, and if you've ever seen him as Columbus in Zombieland, you'll clock the similarities immediately. It's a grounded, older variation on that same energy. He's good at it, don't get me wrong, but there's not a huge amount of surprise in his performance.
Culkin, though, is something else. Benji's manic, people-pleasing energy slowly reveals itself to be something far more painful underneath, and when that hidden anguish finally surfaces, the film earns a genuine emotional gut-punch. It reframes everything you've watched him do in the preceding hour, and suddenly all that overcompensating exuberance looks less like personality and more like a coping mechanism barely holding together. It's a beautifully judged moment, and Culkin nails it.
Among the supporting cast, Kurt Egyiawan is a real standout. He brings a quiet dignity to his role as a fellow tour member, and his personal story carries enormous weight. If I have one significant frustration with the film, it's that the script keeps him on the periphery when there's clearly so much more to explore there. Every time the film lingers on him, you feel it pulling toward something richer, and then it pulls back. That's a shame, because his presence suggests a deeper, more expansive film hiding just beneath the surface of this one.
The Polish settings do carry their own sombre gravity. You can't place a story about Holocaust heritage tourism against this backdrop without invoking history that dwarfs the personal drama unfolding in the foreground, and to its credit the film doesn't shy away from that contrast. It's not as harrowing or immersive as Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which confronts that history head-on and unflinchingly, but A Real Pain isn't trying to do the same thing. It's using the weight of that history to illuminate smaller, quieter questions about family, memory and how we carry loss.
And that's probably the most accurate way to describe the film overall. Small and quiet, but not slight. It captures the messy, unresolved texture of grief and the way family relationships never quite stay where you left them. It doesn't do anything groundbreaking, and there are moments where you can feel it playing it safe when it could've pushed harder. But it's warm, it's well-acted, anchored by a performance from Culkin that deserves every bit of praise it gets, and it leaves you with something to sit with afterwards.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-06-17
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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