SummaryMismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
SummaryMismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
Not only has a real filmmaker emerged with A Real Pain, with both the sensitivity and boldness that could launch a career, but Eisenberg has never let himself be this exposed as a performer.
Eisenberg knocks it out of the park and proves he is a triple threat to be reckoned with, with solid writing, confident directing, and stellar acting — even if, at the end of the day, the film really does belong to Culkin.
Together, [Culkin and Eisenberg] make for a winning pair, balancing each other in a variety of ways that speak to the material’s larger concerns about loss, grief, remembrance and regret.
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.
Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.