A Real Pain

An odd-couple dramedy featuring two of American cinema’s most delightfully acerbic and motormouthed stars, A REAL PAIN is the story of two cousins, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who travel to Poland to pay tribute to their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and connect with their Jewish roots. Nothing tests a relationship quite like going on a trip, and as the cousins journey around the motherland as part of a tour group centred on Jewish history over the past century, their personalities vibe and clash unpredictably, creating a bracing whiplash efect of rage, melancholy and warmth. David is a tightly-wound family man and Benji is an erratic misfit with a nihilistic worldview; Culkin’s performance in particular gives stunning depth to this wounded, loose canon of a character. Written and directed by Eisenberg (his second feature after WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD), A REAL PAIN at times recalls the ofeat psychological portraits of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, yet it contains stirring insights about mental health and intergenerational trauma all its own. (Beatrice Loayza)

Jesse Eisenberg: WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2022)