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A Real Pain (15)

Cast: Will Sharpe, Kurt Egyiawan, Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Grey
Genre: Comedy
Author(s): Jesse Eisenberg
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Release Date: 08/01/2025 (selected cinemas)
Running Time: 90mins
Country: US/Pol
Year: 2024

American Jewish family man David Kaplan travels to Poland with his cousin Benji so they can visit the childhood home of their late grandmother. The pair join a guided tour led by Brit abroad James, joining a small group comprising Marcia, couple Diane and Mark, and Rwandan genocide survivor Eloge. As the tour moves through Poland, David and Benji's relationship becomes visibly strained.

LondonNet Film Review

A Real Pain (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Some journeys of self-discovery are metaphorical. For the bickering, 40-something cousins in Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial outing, a carefully planned road trip to reconnect with their Jewish heritage is literal, shot on location in Poland in collaboration with Warsaw-born cinematographer Michal Dymek. A Real Pain intentionally generates friction between mismatched kin, born three weeks apart, who claim to share the closeness of real brothers…

The duo comprises Eisenberg’s painfully earnest husband and father, whose young son is obsessed with tall buildings, and an emotionally volatile free spirit played with Oscar-tipped gusto by Kieran Culkin, who bluntly says what no one else is thinking and still thrives on his innate charm. He is the kind of garrulous, easy-going nomad who lights up a room and proceeds to relieve himself on everyone and everything inside it, and sermonises in snappy soundbites (“Money’s like heroin for boring people”) which lose their lustre on closer inspection.

Eisenberg’s script deposits the dysfunctional duo in foreign climes and witnesses the fallout (through trembling fingers) as they wrestle with glaringly obvious differences and avoid discussing the event that almost separated them for good. The ebb and flow of character conflict sometimes feels forced and Culkin’s showstopping performance sucks the oxygen out of the rest of the film, leaving Eisenberg to nestle in a pigeon hole as a neurotic and socially awkward chatterbox who is summed up as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late”.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Culkin) travel from New York to Warsaw to celebrate their late grandmother Dory. Benji has been on a “downhill funk” since her death. “She was my favourite person in the world,” he professes. Consequently, the cousins join a heritage tour led by British guide James (Will Sharpe), who is a scholar of eastern European studies at the University of Oxford.

The tour party includes 60-something divorcee Marcia Kramer (Jennifer Grey), whose mother was a survivor of the Holocaust, recently retired Jewish couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane Binder (Liza Sadovy), and Rwandan genocide survivor Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who converted to Judaism 10 years ago. As James shepherds his flock to culturally important sites, culminating in a visit to a preserved Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Majdanek, David and Benji’s strained relationship unravels in front of fellow travellers.

Bookended by close-ups of Culkin’s perplexed face, A Real Pain is a heartfelt story of estrangement and reconciliation that traipses over the same terrain as Treasure, starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry, released in June last year. Eisenberg enthusiastically brandishes sardonic wit to delight in his characters’ toe-curling discomfort. Behind the camera, he engineers a delightfully anti-climactic finale at grandma Dory’s home that neatly sidesteps gooey sentimentality and is authentically unsatisfying. Some final destinations are a letdown.

– Sarah Lee

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