Kieran Culkin is heartbreaking and hilarious in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

It’s been a week since Kieran Culkin won an Emmy for playing Roman Roy in the final season of Succession, and now, he’s hitting the Sundance Film Festival with a magnetic performance that rivals even that.

Culkin stars opposite Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain, Eisenberg’s intimate, affecting dramedy about Jewish cousins on a Holocaust memorial tour through Poland. Eisenberg writes, directs, and stars as uptight New Yorker David Kaplan, but it’s Culkin who commands the screen as David’s extroverted cousin Benji. The two men grew up practically as brothers, born just a few weeks apart, but as adults, they’ve become distant, age only serving to highlight their differences. David is neurotic, responsible, and softspoken, while Benji moves like a human hurricane, a charismatic, fast-talking man-child who can be both insightfully kind and devastatingly selfish. Together, they make for an all-time comedic odd-couple, with both actors showcasing their comedic and dramatic talents.

Eisenberg has written and directed multiple projects for the stage, and A Real Pain is the second film he’s directed, after 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World. His thoughtful script chronicles Benji and David’s odyssey from start to finish, following the unlikely pair as they embark on a tour to honor their late grandmother, who grew up in Poland and survived internment in a concentration camp. Guided by a British history buff (Will Sharpe), they join others on similar pilgrimages, all hoping to gain some new understanding and connect to their Jewish roots. The group includes a recent divorcee (Jennifer Grey), a retired couple (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has since converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan). Together, this disparate crew journeys through Warsaw and Lublin, attempting to immerse themselves in the country’s history and culture.

Benji inadvertently commandeers the group with his charisma, bonding with his tourmates and persuading them to strike absurd poses in front of a memorial statue. Culkin imbues him with an unfiltered and manic energy, and together, he and Eisenberg sparkle with comedic chemistry, bickering in the way that only family members can. But for all his bluster, Benji is adrift, and David starts to worry that his gregarious cousin might be suffering more than he lets on.

The central question at the heart of Benji and David’s journey is how to grapple with emotional pain — be it day-to-day pain, existential pain, or ancestral pain. Even before the trip begins, both Benji and David are hurting in different ways, floundering after the death of their grandmother and unsure about their paths in life. The introverted David holds his anxieties close to his chest. “I feel that my pain is unexceptional,” he admits at one point, “so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” Benji, on the other hand, is so overbrimming with feeling that he can’t help but lash out like an overstimulated child, sniping at David and criticizing their guide for not making the tour feel “real” enough.

In clumsier hands, A Real Pain could have felt disjointed, especially when David and Benji are smoking weed on a rooftop in one scene and walking through the Majdanek concentration camp in another. A film that grapples with the legacy of the Holocaust doesn’t exactly make for automatic comedy, but Eisenberg deftly juggles the film’s shifting tones, evoking real laughs in some scenes while maintaining a somber respect in others. It helps that both Eisenberg and Culkin bring a grounded clarity to David and Benji, even when the two cousins are stuck in absurd circumstances. (Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCary produced the film, and at a post-screening Q&A, Eisenberg thanked Stone for suggesting one of the funniest scenes, where Benji and David accidentally miss their train stop.) The result is a Holocaust film that’s both hilarious and devastatingly real, anchored by Culkin’s unforgettable performance. Grade: B+

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