Kieran Culkin is an Empath Enigma in A Real Pain

On Tuesday night, as the rest of the world poured into Wicked, I slipped into the neighbouring theatre where I, and a surprisingly decent amount of others, took in Jesse Eisenberg's latest effort as writer/director/actor: A Real Pain. I expected this movie to deliver a funny, heartfelt meditation on brotherhood. What I received, instead, was a funny, difficult movie about dealing with past and the trauma that comes with it. This excellent, 90-minute tour through Poland is anchored by a potentially Oscar-worthy performance from Kieran Culkin.

Eisenberg and Culkin play cousins: David and Benji Kaplan (respectively). These two, who used to be close but grew apart during adulthood, travel to Poland to honour their recently deceased grandmother and visit the home she grew up in prior to World War II. As Jewish people, the Kaplan grandmother was removed from her home, placed in a concentration camp by the Nazi party, survived the war and emigrated to America, forever leaving behind her homeland. This ancestral trauma informs the events of A Real Pain.

This is Culkin's first time appearing on the big screen since his acclaimed performance as Roman Roy in Succession. It is a welcome return, as Culkin delivers the best performance of his movie career as Benji, an empath enigma with a troubling past and a demeanour that swaps from flippant to passionate. At one moment, he cracks crude jokes and, at the next, he berates the hypocrisy of their plush Holocaust tour.

Throughout the movie, Eisenberg's David often mistakes Benji's selflessness for selfishness. David thinks that Benji is acting in a selfish manner by making everything about him; by making the world bend to his will. But that is actually a mistake. Benji is selfless. He does not act for his own benefit. He acts out of sympathy for others, living and dead. He demands silence at a centuries-old graveyard not for his own reflection but out of respect for the dead, even if they passed hundreds of years ago. Even when his cousin sleeps deeply on a train, he refuses to wake him because he doesn't want to disturb his peace.

Culkin's Benji is an empath, but he is also an enigma. About halfway through the movie, David reveals Beji's great secret to the cousins' small tour group. Although the audience becomes aware of the secret, we are not given context to its cause or ramifications. Instead, it is used to inform Benji's actions without giving us clear context about who this man is when he's not on “vacation” in Poland.

An enigma is a classic character device dating back, at least, to Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. It's one of my favourite character devices. Its use in A Real Pain is exciting and fresh in that the enigma is so close to the protagonist (Eisenberg's David). Usually, the enigma is shrouded in mystery. But, as Eisenberg shows us in A Real Pain, an enigma can be as close to you as flesh and blood. Just because you know somebody does not mean that you understand them.

Benji is brutally honest. A Real Pain reveals how being honest, although sometimes painful, can lead to greater understanding. He may suddenly blow up at the tour group, but this only leads to the other tourists expressing their gratitude, for the honesty helps expand their perspective. Benji will shut the door on a shared experience that does not match his empathy, but it only leads to a window opening for each person's own, personal reflection.

A Real Pain's central theme is coping with past trauma. It's about the baggage we carry – both literally and metaphorically. David and Benji, as they travel through Poland, always have their backpacks on their back and on their soul.

David has a wonderful monologue in the middle of the movie. It is the character's central thesis of existence – how he deals with pain compared with Benji. This central monologue is Eisenberg's best moment in the movie. Throughout, Eisenberg is fantastic but he acts as he usually does. Anyone familiar with his work knows that Eisenberg is rather one dimensional. However, he is one of the few actors that seems to understand his shortcomings and uses them to inform his character. It is difficult to find an actor that is so monotoned who can also reach such great emotional depths through facial expression, vocal inflection and body language.

For example, at one part in the movie, Benji and David walk together and they notice the divorcée in their group (played by Jennifer Grey) walking alone. David suggests that maybe she wants to be alone. Benji retorts that nobody ever wants to be alone. Benji goes off and talks with her, in his charming, hilarious way. However, by going off to talk with her, he leaves his cousin alone. Eisenberg excellently reflects David's uneasiness with being alone through body language. It's a wonderful moment that reflects the truth in Benji's wisdom while showing David's reliance on human connection.

Despite having great wisdom, Benji cannot get out of his own way. He often imposes isolation upon himself, despite knowing that no one wants to be alone. It seems that Benji embraces solitude as a selfless action. He searches for another lost soul, one that needs a human connection as bad as he does.

As we enter the early stages of Award Season, A Real Pain has a number of things going for it. It's produced by Emma Stone's production company, Fruit Tree, which also produced Eisenberg's directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World. The polish producer is Ewa Puszczyńska, who also produced Ida, Cold War and The Zone of Interest. A Real Pain premiered at 2024's Sundance and the screening sparked an all-night auction for its distribution rights. (Searchlight Pictures won the rights with its $10-million bid.) Eisenberg has already won this year's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance and Culkin won Best Supporting Actor at the New York Film Critics Circle.

It would not surprise me to see Culkin nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award at the upcoming Academy Awards. Indeed, I think he deserves it. In the Behind the Lens interview, Eisenberg discussed working with Culkin: “He didn't want to talk about the character, didn't want to do any rehearsal, didn't want to get notes in between takes … It was so surreal … He would have no sense from one moment to the next what he as doing, he was just, like, living in this space in this very real way.”

A Real Pain is about the past, getting over and accepting modern reality. The cousins romanticize their grandmother and their place in history, but, in the reality of modern day, time moves on and things change. Nothing remains the same except our inability to escape the present. Although we want to honour the past, we must acknowledge that times change and it's in everyone's best interest to move on.

I would highly recommend this movie. It is in theatres now but it's not necessary to see it on the big screen. Once it hits streaming, A Real Pain is a great option for a short, insightful and funny movie.