A Real Pain (2024) on Netflix
Cousins David and Benji travel to Poland on a Jewish heritage tour their late grandmother paid for, hoping to see her childhood home. Benji criticizes David for losing his spontaneity.
- Watch on NetflixThis title is not on Netflix right now. Please check back later for updates.
- Watch on Prime
- Watch on NordVPN
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.0/10166,286 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Benji Kaplan waits at John F. Kennedy International Airport for his once-close cousin David, and the two board their flight to Poland. Money their late grandmother left pays for a Jewish heritage tour, and both want to see the house she grew up in. David is pragmatic and reserved, while Benji is free-spirited and outspoken, and the cousins argue. In Warsaw they join their group: Mark and Diane, a married couple from Shaker Heights, Ohio, both retired; Marcia, a recent divorcee from California; Eloge, who survived the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism in Winnipeg; and James, their knowledgeable guide from Yorkshire. The group visits Grzybów Square, the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and the Warsaw Uprising Monument, where Benji organizes a reenactment and an embarrassed David stands apart, taking pictures with the others' phones.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Real Pain (2024)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kieran Culkin tried to back out of A Real Pain two weeks before filming began, wanting to stay close to his family after wrapping Succession, but Emma Stone convinced him to stay by pointing out that the entire production would essentially fall apart if he left.
- At the 97th Academy Awards, Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain, which was not nominated for Best Picture, making him the first actor to win that category from a non-Best Picture nominee since Christopher Plummer for 2010's Beginners.
- In March 2025, following the film's success, President Andrzej Duda granted Jesse Eisenberg Polish citizenship. Eisenberg called it "an honor of a lifetime" and something he had been interested in for two decades.
- Jesse Eisenberg first offered the role of Benji to Eric André, who turned it down, saying that going to Poland for six weeks to shoot a movie where they just babbled about the Holocaust "seems like a bummer."
- Eisenberg was ready to scrap the script when an advertisement for a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp with a complimentary lunch appeared on his computer screen. He said it summed up being a third-generation survivor: "There's no good way to experience this."
- Eisenberg did not send Kieran Culkin the first ten pages of the script at first, because he thought the part of Benji should go to a Jewish actor, while Culkin was raised Catholic.
- Jesse Eisenberg initially wanted to play Benji himself, since he shares some of the character's traits, but the producers told him not to take on an "unhinged" performance while directing at the same time.
- Cinematographer Michał Dymek combined standard lenses with longer optics, which flatten perspective, so that the same image could be defined differently depending on the focal lens chosen.
