Kieran Culkin

In A Real Pain (2024), Kieran Culkin’s Benji Kaplan hugs strangers at the airport. He seems to have skipped the part where people decide how well they know one another, and Culkin makes that unsettling as well as funny. The panic remains visible beneath the noise, so his friendliness never looks entirely comfortable. Culkin lets us see how exhausting it would be to travel with him.

The lead in Igby Goes Down (2002) marked the move out of child roles, followed by several years away from the screen, working in theatre. He returned as Wallace Wells in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), whose precise jokes make its repetitive fights forgivable. Then Succession (2018–2023) brought widespread recognition for his Roman Roy, another sarcastic man whose abrasiveness does not quite conceal his vulnerability. It is a recognisable set of parts; we would be interested to see him deprived of the ready supply of insults.

Soderbergh finds something nastier in Culkin’s unpredictability in No Sudden Move (2021), casting him as Charley Barnes among the armed men holding a family in a kitchen. We were frightened by how little Charley seemed to have decided about what he might do next. Soderbergh keeps the morning light flat and the music absent while toast is made; Culkin needs no shouting to make the kitchen unsafe. The film’s later explanations are less interesting than these men, which is a limitation of the writing rather than of his performance.

Jesse Eisenberg gets the best from him in A Real Pain, directing and playing Benji’s cousin David. Culkin’s preference for spontaneous delivery and minimal rehearsal suits a man who says what everyone else is too polite to say. It is his finest work because he never softens Benji’s behaviour to make his distress easier to watch. Our reservation is that when he stops talking, there is too little elsewhere to hold our attention. Start there for Culkin, but expect to spend some of the quieter passages waiting for him to speak.