On February 20, Ukrainian cinemas started screening the comedy drama «A Real Pain» starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. For Eisenberg, the film is his second feature film as a director, and Culkin received a «Golden Globe» and a «Oscar» nomination for his role in the film. The American Film Institute and the National Board of Film Critics named «A Real Pain» one of the ten best films of 2024. In this review, we will analyze what made the film by a not-so-experienced director so widely recognized.
Pluses:
A good human story that touches on important issues; great acting, especially from Kieran Culkin; fascinating location shooting in Poland;
Minuses:
the plot does not imply any revelations; some may not find the evolution of the characters' characters, who are not radically changed by this journey, enough;
«A Real Pain»
Genre comedy drama
Director Jesse Eisenberg
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharp, Jennifer Gray, Kurt Egian, Lisa Sadowy, Daniel Oreskes, Ellora Torchia
Premiere movie theaters
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
A slightly twitchy young man named David Kaplan nervously leaves one voicemail after another addressed to his cousin Benji, with whom David is about to travel from New York to Poland. There, the boys plan to join a tour group and visit historical sites and monuments related to World War II and the Holocaust, as well as the house where their recently deceased grandmother lived. She managed to survive the hell of a concentration camp, and it was the old woman who bequeathed this trip to her grandchildren.
In fact, David and Benji are complete opposites. The former can hardly be called self-confident, and it seems as if he has completely forgotten how to express emotions. The latter is used to cutting the mother truth and seems to be the one who is hard to upset, but this is a deceptive feeling. They used to be inseparable, but as they grew up, David started a family and got a good job, and Benji never left his parents’ house with a joint of weed in his hand. Perhaps this journey will be useful not only for each of them individually, but also for their difficult relationship.
Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature film, which is actually a personal film for him, is indeed about unspeakable pain, about the irreparable trauma of the past and reflection on it. But at the same time, Eisenberg, as a screenwriter, contrasts this trauma with the current «catastrophes» third-generation immigrants, who are far removed from the suffering of concentration camp inmates. It is unlikely that the protagonists’ grandmother fought for survival so that later they could not find a common language and became almost strangers. And certainly not for one of them to literally neglect his own life.
The scene in which the tourist group is seated in the comfortable first class of a Polish train and enjoys snacks on the way to the former Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin is telling. It is at this point that Kieran Culkin’s character begins to experience cognitive dissonance, given that during World War II, the ancestors of all those present, including Jews, traveled on the same railroad track under completely different conditions. The episode in which Benji begins to fool around next to the Warsaw Uprising Monument also evokes ambiguous feelings in terms of morality and historical memory.
The main driving force of this story is still the relationship between two brothers, each of whom has his own pain in his heart. The sad thing is that only such a tragic event as the death of their grandmother made them pay attention to each other again and talk about personal things, about something important.
Jesse Eisenberg habitually, and most importantly, appropriately endows his character with embarrassment and indecision. However, Kieran Culkin shines the brightest among all those present, whose character evokes contradictory feelings. On the one hand, his sincerity, and openness are admirable, but on the other hand, he can do something wild and inadequate the very next moment.
Culkin has brilliantly coped with the acting tasks assigned to him; it is not for nothing that his name appears on the shortlists of many prestigious film awards — from the Screen Actors Guild to the «Oscar». Along with Culkin, russian Yura Borisov is also in the running for an Academy Award for his role in «Anorah» by Sean Baker.
«A Real Pain» — is a tragicomic, life-affirming story whose characters look like real people with their own problems and shortcomings, with interesting interactions.
Despite the tragic scale of the themes that are raised here, the film makes a pleasant impression. The plot is neatly packaged in a sunny buddy movie/road movie set to Chopin’s music, which is not about death at all, but rather about life. No wonder it’s so lively at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which pensive Benji can’t help but watch.
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