A Real Pain is a 2024 comedy-drama written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, marking his second feature as a filmmaker following When You Finish Saving the World. The film follows two adult cousins — the anxious, emotionally guarded David (Eisenberg) and the spontaneous, charismatic Benji (Kieran Culkin) — who travel to Poland to honor the memory of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who escaped Warsaw as a teenager. What they discover on the trip is not just a country's buried history, but the profound distance that has grown between them over the years.

The film operates with remarkable economy — at just 90 minutes, it packs an extraordinary emotional range into a deliberately intimate frame. Eisenberg's screenplay finds comedy and tragedy in the same moments, particularly in Benji's provocations during a guided Holocaust memorial tour, where his refusal to perform decorum reads as both deeply inappropriate and deeply honest. Culkin delivers a performance of such uncontained vitality and devastating warmth that it functions as a complete character study within the film's minimalist structure. Will Sharpe, Liza Sadovy, and Jennifer Grey round out the supporting cast.

A Real Pain premiered at Sundance in January 2024 to immediate awards buzz and was acquired by Searchlight Pictures. Kieran Culkin won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at the 97th Academy Awards — the film's most prominent recognition among multiple nominations including Best Original Screenplay. Critics praised the film's tonal precision, its ability to shift from laugh-out-loud humor to genuine grief without warning, and its refusal to deliver the easy catharsis that stories about loss so often reach for. The film streams on Hulu.