A Real Pain.

Jesse Eisenberg has come into plenty of acclaim as an actor, but A Real Pain, his second turn as a director and writer might herald an even brighter future on that side of the camera. He co-stars in this taut, funny, thoughtful film with Kieran Culkin, who gets the better character here and plays the absolute hell out of it, relegating Eisenberg to straight-man status for large stretches of the story, as Culkin seizes the film by the throat and refuses to let go.

The two men play cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), who meet up at an airport at the start of the film as they embark on a weeklong tour of Poland that is focused on the history of Polish Jews, including a visit to a concentration camp, after which the two will peel off on their own and visit the house where their recently deceased grandmother grew up. Both were close to her, but Benji was especially so, and he has struggled to cope with her death. The two form a classic odd couple, as David is successful, straitlaced, anxious, and extremely worried about Benjy; while Benjy is outspoken, charming, unbounded, and seems to lack a purpose in life.

The two are joined on a tour by the recently divorced Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a man who fled the Rwandan genocide as a boy and later converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan), and a somewhat older Jewish couple with an ancestor from Poland who came to the U.S. well before World War II (Daniel Oreskes & Liza Sadovy). The tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), isn’t Jewish, for which he seems to apologize in every other sentence, and he takes his job as guide extremely seriously.

Benjy is the smoke bomb thrown in the middle of the group, as he swears constantly, asks uncomfortable questions, and generally speaks his mind even in situations where decorum might call for him to say less. He’s the conscience of the story, though, saying what needs to be said, even if his delivery could use some work. David, of course, is appalled by much of his cousin’s behavior – including Benjy smuggling cannabis into Poland – but also envies Benjy’s apparently carefree attitude and the way that other people gravitate so much more strongly to his cousin, something that’s especially apparent as the two men say goodbye to the tour group to go to their grandmother’s hometown.

The visit to the Majdanek concentration camp, which fleeing Nazi forces failed to destroy as Soviet troops approached, also provides Eisenberg with one of his strongest scenes as director. The imagery is so potent that it requires very little dialogue, and you would expect these people to be nearly silent in their discomfort, horror, grief, and so on. The shots of the tourists walking by the gas chamber are brief, but so strong, and when it’s followed by James’s explanation that the blue stains on the walls are the residues of the hydrogen cyanide gas used to murder Jews and other inmates at the camp, it ties back somberly to something Benjy said earlier to the group that at the time might have seemed histrionic. The script ends up validating Benjy many times over, without exactly excusing some of his more boorish actions.

Culkin is on another level here, way beyond the solid performances he gave on Succession; Benjy is far more interesting and nuanced than Roman, who was an entitled and often gross little prat, and didn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities or even a good reason for why he was the way he was. Benjy is such a rich, intelligently written character, and Culkin plays him perfectly, making it clear why he is the life of the party while also showing that that’s something of a façade. He’s much better than Eisenberg, who plays that character he nearly always plays, the nebbish, fast-talking guy who doesn’t seem to have feelings; there is one scene, at a restaurant, where Eisenberg gets the floor, and we finally see inside David, and the film could probably have used a little more of that. Sharpe, who was so good in Giri/Haji and very good in The White Lotus, is excellent in a smaller role, nailing his interactions with Benjy so that you feel his discomfort and understand the evolution of his reactions over the course of the tour.

The only film I’ve seen in this cycle that was better than this is Anora, and that’s largely because that film is more ambitious; A Real Pain is tight and trim at 90 minutes and wastes none of it, doing what it set out to do and dropping you back at the airport before you know what hit you. Culkin seems like a lock to get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and I really hope this ends up with a Best Picture nod or, at worst, a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Eisenberg. It’s better than Conclave and so much better than Emilia Pérez, just to name two movies that have better current odds for a Best Picture nod. I can not imagine I’ll see ten better films from 2024 than this.