Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg play once-tight cousins in a road trip comedy-drama that has the latter returning to his Jewish-Polish roots to get to grips with his real family history. Culkin, just as motor-mouthed and f-bombing as Succession’s Roman Roy, but here with an extra slug of despair, is the manic yin to Eisenberg’s neurotic but compassionate yang. It’s an inspired on-screen pairing that plays to both actor’s strengths and finds space for melancholy amid some deeply awkward laughs.
The set-up sees Eisenberg’s digital ad salesman David leaving his beloved wife and daughter at home to accompany Culkin’s manically exuberant Benji on a trip to Poland. The pair are tracing the younger life of their now-deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and their emotionally draining itinerary holds ghettos, concentration camps and a journey to bubbe’s hometown. So what could go wrong for a man with absolutely no filter joining a tour of Holocaust sites? Obviously, everything.
In an assured second directorial effort (after 2023’s When You Finish Saving the World) that owes a little something to the thorny naturalism of Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, Eisenberg-the-filmmaker leans on Eisenberg-the-actor to keep things grounded. David is a perennial worrier, and one of his major concerns is what people around him are thinking. Being stuck with Benji, therefore, is a burden. But he worries deeply for his cousin, too, and loves him too.
Culkin has the much showier role as Benji. He flips out and vacates the group’s first-class train carriage when it suddenly dawns on him that luxurious train travel is inappropriate on a Holocaust tour, but also gets the group to throw poses among the statues of Polish resistance fighters at the Warsaw Uprising Monument.
Culkin is just as motor-mouthed as in Succession but adds a slug of despair
A fellow tour party member suggests when Culkin’s out of earshot, there’s real pain ‘beneath all the mishegoss’ (the Yiddish word for craziness). Culkin communicates that half-buried angst through gestures and the occasional air of a scolded puppy. His boyish sadness spreads through the film like mist, giving the title its second meaning.
Eisenberg’s screenplay takes trouble to flesh out the supporting characters, too. There’s a lovely kinship with the rest of the tour group, with Will Sharpe as a well-meaning English guide struggling to get Benji’s measure, and Kurt Egyiawan’s Rwandan refugee, now naturalised in Canada, patiently explaining how his experiences led him to convert to Judaism. Jennifer Grey pops up in her meatiest role in ages – the #Greynaissance starts here – as a New York divorcee who connects with Benji’s pain. Think of this as Eisenberg’s funny, bittersweet ‘Trip to Poland’.
A Real Pain is in UK cinemas Jan 10, 2025.