2024’s Most Heartbreaking Drama With 96% on RT Is Blowing Up Hulu's Top Charts
An Oscars favorite and simply a poignant work that will touch your heart.
On January 16, A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg's second film, which won the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, was released on Hulu.
Despite a rather quiet start at the global box office, A Real Pain has been well-received on streaming – the film confidently holds the number one spot among the most-watched movies on the platform.
What Is A Real Pain About?
Cousins David and Benjamin are on a joint tour of their historic homeland, Poland. Everything is as their late grandmother, a hereditary Jewish emigrant who survived World War II and the Holocaust, left it in her will.
Each brother has his own reason for traveling: David, a successful careerist and family man, is concerned about the emotional state of Benji, who recently attempted suicide. Benji dreams of reliving his childhood, when his grandmother was still alive and David was not so busy and bored.
The brothers begin to explore themselves through historical museums and former concentration camps.
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Eisenberg's idea was to place two opposite characters within the Holocaust story, each struggling with their own personal brand of pain: David suffers from neurotic anxiety, and Benji descends into the depths of depression.
The cousins, close in blood but distant in spirit, highlight each other's psychological problems, which to some may seem faceless and even ridiculous against the backdrop of the horrors of the past.
A Real Pain Is One of Kieran Culkin's Best Roles
Jesse Eisenberg communicates his thoughts mainly through Benji, played by Kieran Culkin. The eccentric young man subtly feels other people's pain, cries and scolds a tour guide at the old cemetery, who throws out facts but cannot remain silent for a second.
In addition, Benji constantly makes those around him think. 80 years ago, their relatives rode death trains to concentration camps; today, tourists travel comfortably on high-speed trains in Poland.
Benji doubts that modern man is able to put himself in the place of his ancestors, to fully understand the suffering they went through.
It comes as no surprise that Culkin is now one of the odds-on favorites to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor – this is undoubtedly one of the best roles of his career, as confirmed by the Golden Globe he already won for it.
A Real Pain, Despite Being a Heavy Drama, Gives You a Feeling of Warmth
Difficult but necessary conversations about memory and preserving the legacy of the ancestors are interspersed with the cousins' hilarious adventures. Eisenberg finds a balance between comedy and drama that keeps the movie from being superficial or overwhelming.
Incomprehensibly, A Real Pain never allows itself a false note. The relationship between the brothers is the basis of this drama: there is antagonism, fear, concern, resentment, but above all a great, great love – the kind that happens in families where warmth violates all personal boundaries.