Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie A Real Pain has what Succession fans have been missing
This initial report on A Real Paincomes from our team following the premieres at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. We’ll update this piece when there’s more information about the movie’s release.
A Real Pain is a sweet dramedy about two cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland on a Holocaust tour to visit their grandmother’s house a few months after her death. Eisenberg wrote and directed — it’s his second directorial project, after 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World.
In the film, David sets off to Poland with his cousin Benji to connect with their roots by joining a Holocaust tour and visiting the onetime home of their recently deceased grandmother, who survived the camps and escaped Europe. The two cousins were close once, but it’s clear that time and circumstances have taken their lives down different paths.
David (Eisenberg) isn’t the nervous little kid he used to be, but he’s still reserved and a little quieter than Benji (Culkin). He lives in a beautiful apartment in New York with his wife and young child, and he makes a good living selling internet ads that keep free websites afloat, as he explains to Benji. (Polygon thanks you, David.)
Benji, meanwhile, is still basically the fun-loving, carefree kid he always was, maybe to a fault. When people first meet him, they love him in a heartbeat. He still lights up any room he walks into. And he still has a hair-trigger temper that even he doesn’t really understand.
As the two travel Poland with their tour group, they get a much better understanding of each other, their family, and the past that they’re still deeply connected to.
The movie’s comparatively low stakes mostly keep it grounded to a story of two disconnected cousins who both so clearly miss the friendship they had when they were kids, and want to get back to it. David can’t understand why Benji isn’t growing up in all the ways that David has. Benji can’t admit that he feels left behind. All this is set against the
Read more on polygon.com
