A Real Pain review – Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin spar in sublimely bittersweet Holocaust tour movie

The stars play Jewish American cousins touring Poland in honour of their grandmother in Eisenberg’s sharp, highly personal comedy boasting an Oscar-tipped performance from Culkin

It’s a slip of a thing, clocking in at a tight 90 minutes; a deft, light-footed amalgamation of two potentially formulaic comedy genres: the road movie and the mismatched buddy flick. But the second directorial venture from actor Jesse Eisenberg, which he also wrote and stars in, is considerably more than the seemingly slight sum of its parts. A Real Pain is a whip-sharp comedy driven by the rattling verbal sparring between uptight, neurotic David (Eisenberg) and his outgoing, unpredictable cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin). It’s also a profound character study – a substantial and emotionally nourishing journey that contains, courtesy of Culkin, perhaps the most devastating final shot of any film you will see this year.

It’s a notable step up for Eisenberg as a writer-director. His 2022 debut, When You Finish Saving the World, was an abrasive comedy of discomfort which, like A Real Pain, dug into the tensions between disconnected family members (in this case, Julianne Moore’s steely, do-gooder mother and Finn Wolfhard’s feckless aspiring musician son). It was a passably entertaining comedy drama; however it failed to connect with audiences largely because Eisenberg leaned on tired archetypes instead of creating fleshed-out characters for the central roles. There’s no such problem with A Real Pain: the writing is sublimely satisfying and textured, the characters persuasively realised, and the jostling, combative dialogue feels fully alive and refreshingly unpredictable, rather than a laboured assortment of words on a page.