A Real Pain is a brutally honest indie gem that dives headfirst into the messiness of grief, family, history, and memory, all through a sharply irreverent lens. Following two cousins on a trip to Poland to honor their late Holocaust-survivor grandmother, the film zigzags between absurdity and aching vulnerability. The dialogue is a masterclass in emotional whiplash—quotes that make you laugh out loud in one breath and sucker-punch your chest in the next.
Here are the 10 best quotes from A Real Pain:
1.
“Like, I… I, I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him… and I wanna be him, you know?”
– David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg)
2.
“We’re on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don’t know what to tell you, man.”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
3.
“We stay moving. We stay light. We stay agile.”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
4.
“You used to be so emotional. You used to fucking cry about everything, man. Like…”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
5.
“Money’s like fucking heroin for boring people.”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
6.
“Man, what’s stupid is the corporatization of travel. Ensuring that the rich move around the world, propagate their elitist loins, while the poor stay cut off from society.”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
7.
“Yeah. I mean, he’s always been, like, up and down, you know? Like, he’s sensitive, and he, like, sees people so clearly, you know? But then you say the wrong thing and, like, something switches. Or maybe it’s not appropriate to talk about him.”
– David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg)
8.
“You are, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who’s always running late. And I gotta, like, fish that fuckin’ guy outta ya every time I see ya.”
– Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin)
9.
“And that our grandma survived by a thousand miracles when the entire world was trying to kill her, you know? And I look at him and I just, like, wanna ask him… I just wanna ask him, and I just can’t. Like… like, how did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?”
– David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg)
10.
“And, yeah, I don’t… yeah, I don’t wanna lose you, okay? You see how people love you? Do you see what happens when you walk into a room? I would give anything to know what that feels like, man. To know what it feels like to have charm. To light up a room when I walk in. But you light up a room and then you, like, shit on everything inside of it.”
– David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg)