Principal photography took place primarily in Poland from May to June 2023. A Real Pain premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and was released theatrically in the United States on November 1, 2024 and in Poland on November 8 by Searchlight Pictures. The film received positive reviews from critics, with praise for Culkin's performance and Eisenberg's screenplay, and grossed $14.4 million worldwide against a production budget of $3 million.
American Jewish cousins David and Benji Kaplan embark on a trip from New York City to Poland to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother and to connect with their heritage. David, a reserved and pragmatic father and husband, contrasts sharply with Benji, a free-spirited and outspoken drifter. Their personalities clash as Benji criticizes David for losing his former passion and spontaneity, while David struggles with Benji's unfiltered outbursts and lack of direction in life.
The pair are traveling as part of a Holocaust tour group composed of a retired married couple, a lonely divorcée, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism. It is led by James, a knowledgeable yet detached gentile tour guide from the United Kingdom. The cousins' dynamic is tested throughout the trip, from a missed train stop to a confrontation at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Lublin where Benji critiques the tour's lack of emotional authenticity and challenges its focus on facts and statistics, to David's embarrassment. Benji nonetheless connects with the group members, who find themselves moved by his emotional honesty.
During a group dinner, Benji continues behaving inappropriately and making uncomfortable comments, prompting the tour group to confront him delicately. Benji leaves the table, and David opens up to the group about the complex mixture of admiration, resentment, and envy he feels towards his cousin. He additionally reveals that the two have drifted apart and Benji recently tried to take his own life by overdosing on sleeping pills six months earlier.
During David and Benji's last day with the tour, they visit Majdanek, a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp. Before departing from the group, James tells Benji that he is the first person on one of his tours to provide him with feedback, and thanks him for changing his perspective on the way he should lead his tour.
On their final night in Poland, the cousins smoke marijuana on a hotel rooftop together, where Benji confronts David about his changed personality and why he never visits him. While David initially responds that he is busy with his wife and child, he eventually breaks down and explains that following Benji's suicide attempt, he is unable to bear the thought of a person with Benji's passion for life killing themselves.
David and Benji travel to their grandmother's former home in Krasnystaw as their final stop, where Benji recounts an incident from years earlier where their grandmother slapped him after he arrived late and intoxicated to dinner with her. He states that the slap gave him a sense of clarity and humility, and laments that she was the only person able to keep him disciplined. David suggests that they place visitation stones on the home as an act of remembrance, but a neighbor asks them to remove the stones due to safety concerns.
The pair return to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where Benji declines David's offers both to bring him to his home in the city for dinner and to drive Benji to Penn Station for his train back home to Binghamton. This prompts David to slap Benji, although they immediately reconcile and profess that they care deeply about each other. David returns home to his wife and child, while Benji sits alone at the airport, observing other groups of travelers around him.
In August 2022, Screen Daily exclusively announced that Jesse Eisenberg would write, direct, and star in A Real Pain opposite Kieran Culkin. Emma Stone, Dave McCary and Ali Herting were set to produce for Fruit Tree.[9]A Real Pain is Eisenberg's second feature film as a writer-director and second collaboration with Fruit Tree, following When You Finish Saving the World (2022).[10] It is also Culkin's first major project after the conclusion of the satirical comedy-drama television series Succession (2018–2023).[11]
Eisenberg was unfamiliar with Culkin's work prior to developing A Real Pain, but cast him based on his essence and his sister's recommendation.[12][13] He did not send Culkin the first ten pages of the script at first because he thought the role should be given to a Jewish actor;[14] Culkin was raised Irish Catholic.[15] Eisenberg initially wanted to play Benji, as he possesses some of his characteristics, but the producers suggested that he should not take on an "unhinged" performance while directing at the same time.[14] He admitted to Vulture that he had "17,000 thoughts" about casting a non-Jewish actor in a role intended for a Jewish character, "and where I come out is [Culkin] gave me an amazing gift by helping to tell this story that is very personal for my family."[16]
Culkin, on the other hand, was hesitant to jump into another "intense" project so soon after wrapping Succession.[17] He tried to back out of A Real Pain two weeks before filming began, citing his need to not be away from his family as the main reason,[18][19] but he loved Eisenberg's "beautiful" script and When You Finish Saving the World.[17][18] Stone guilt tripped him into staying on by telling him that if he were to leave, the entire production would essentially fall apart.[19]
Writing
Eisenberg comes from a secular Jewish background and has Polish ancestry.[20][21] For twenty years, he has struggled with answering the question of how he could reconcile his "modern daily challenges" with his Ashkenazi ancestors' historical trauma as Holocaust victims and survivors.[22][23] When he started writing A Real Pain in 2022, which initially began as a thought experiment, Eisenberg sought to place two modern, mismatched cousins struggling with "different degrees of pain," such as anxiety and depression, against the backdrop of the horrors of World War II. The setting allowed him to explore those themes in a "visually explicit" manner and "implicitly" ask questions in a way that did not feel didactic.[22]
Filming
Principal photography took place in New York City and various locations across Poland from May to June 2023.[24][25] Because Eisenberg started writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, he used the street view feature on Google Maps and pictures he took when he traveled to Poland with his wife in 2008 to scout locations and take the tour that the characters were going on.[26] Michał Dymek, the cinematographer, is a native of Warsaw and was raised with historical awareness of the events that occurred in his country.[26] His deep knowledge of his hometown helped Eisenberg film montages that would highlight Poland's beauty:[26]
I wanted the portrayal of Poland in general to feel beautiful and dynamic and colorful and all the things that I feel when I'm there. I feel it's too often depicted as bleak, fetishizing its Eastern EuropeanSoviet communist history and fetishizing the horrors of the war. And that's not the Poland I know at all. The Poland I know is vibrant and colorful and warm. So I wanted to show that side of Poland, which is a side that I hadn't seen a lot in American movies, a side that felt just completely true to me.
Dymek's main artistic idea was to work with perspective, as the film features characters who see themselves differently. He wanted to combine their observations by using standard lenses with longer optics, which flattens the perspective to "play with the fact that sometimes the same image can be defined differently by choosing a different focal lens."[27]
Shortly after its Sundance premiere, Searchlight Pictures acquired worldwide rights to the film for $10 million in an all-night auction.[42][43] It had a limited theatrical release on November 1, 2024, and began a wide release on November 15.[44] The film was previously scheduled to be released on October 18, but was subsequently pushed by two weeks.[45]A Real Pain premiered in Poland at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews as the opening film of the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival.[46][47] It was then distributed to theaters in the country on November 8, 2024.[48] The film was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland on January 8, 2025.[49] It was previously scheduled to be released on January 10, but was pushed up by two days.[48]
Home media
A Real Pain was released to the digital platforms on December 31, 2024,[50] and became available for streaming on Hulu in the U.S. on January 16, 2025.[51] It will be released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on Blu-ray and DVD on February 4.[52]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 243 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Led by a scene-stealing turn from Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a powerfully funny, emotionally resonant dramedy that finds writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg playing to his strengths on either side of the camera."[53]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 86 out of 100, based on 54 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[54]
The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney described A Real Pain as "funny, heartfelt, and moving in equal measure."[2] He praised Eisenberg's "impeccable" judgement and great skill at "balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned."[2]Owen Gleiberman for Variety welcomed Eisenberg into a "hallowed company" of actors who turned out to be born filmmakers, such as Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper.[1] To Ed Potton of The Sunday Times, the story was "perfectly weighted between bleak and warm, poignant and irreverent."[55] Bill Goodykontz, in a review for The Arizona Republic, thought Eisenberg pulled off a magic trick by making a film with "backdrops of pain and despair, both personal and existential, that is also funny, charming and something approaching uplifting."[56] For IndieWire's annual critics poll, of which 177 critics and journalists from around the world voted, Eisenberg's work placed second on the Best Screenplay list, behind Sean Baker's script for Anora.[57]
^Kepnes, Caroline (October 2005). "Schmoozin' with Mila Kunis". JVibe. Archived from the original on June 3, 2006. Retrieved January 16, 2016. Mila Kunis on Culkin: "No my boyfriend was raised Irish Catholic..."
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