A Real Pain didn't work that much for me. Despite the reviews it's getting, especially for Culkin's performance, the film felt emotionally stilted and Culkin, while often brilliant, had a character written so thinly that I never felt connected to it. The film felt like it was telling us more than showing us most of the time with characters voicing their inner monologues instead of making us feel real. The connections between Culkin's characters and Eisenberg's also never felt earned.
A Real Pain is rather short in duration and I feel this hurt it as it didn't have time to really create the characters or build their relationships in a way that felt real. So as they attempted to deal with trauma, it didn't resonate. The film relies on a lot of assumptions on how we are supposed to feel. The most powerful moments were near the end touring a concentration camp where Eisenberg allows us to just take in the images of that legacy of evil and suffering. But his attempt to connect that to the characters he had written wasn't successful.
I never bought into the relationship these cousins had in a way that made me invested in them. And the script didn't make Culkin's character either a clown nor a martyr. He was mostly just awkwardly existing in scene to scene. A Real Pain felt like a lot of potential that just never quite materialized.
A Real Pain
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey
Writer/Director: Jesse Eisenberg
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