Dir: Jesse Eisenberg. With: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey. USA 2024. 90 mins.
When two Jewish cousins embark on a ‘Holocaust tour’ of Poland, they are simultaneously attempting to honour their late grandmother and to rekindle their once-strong friendship. Yet familial tensions, personality clashes and cultural insensitivities combine to make this ancestral odyssey a less than smooth journey.
Jesse Eisenberg, who also writes and directs, is the neurotic half of the duo, while Succession’s Kieran Culkin proves his big-screen bona fides as his looser, wisecracking cousin. There is plenty of comedy to be wrung out of these two characters and their odd-couple dynamic, but there is also a real depth to the script and performances. Much like Culkin’s Benji, at first glance A Real Pain seems to be solely concerned with cracking jokes, but this film has real things to say about family, about history, and about pain.
A delight and a revelation — a deft, funny, heady, beautifully staged ramble of a road movie Owen Gleiberman, Variety
