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With “The History of Concrete,” John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and pretentious art films like “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Trying to extract laughs (and deeper insights, on occasion) from a free-associative look at people and projects with ties of some kind to the ugly building material, Wilson feigns interest in “something that occupies so much of your visual environment,” presenting what feels like a parody of nonfiction filmmaking (the loosely structured essay form, at least).
A key conceit of “The History of Concrete” is that no one in their right mind would finance such a film, much less want to watch it. The helmer (and host of HBO’s “How To With John Wilson”) would also like you to think he’s totally unqualified to oversee such a project. And yet, here it is, premiering on opening night of Sundance’s final edition in Park City, Utah. Unless you work for the concrete industry (and those look like fun folks, from a visit to a Las Vegas convention), it’s hard to imagine you saying, “Enough with the jokes. Tell us more about concrete!”
Wilson opens the film in his signature second-person style, telling you what “you” are experiencing in his nasal New York accent, using ultra-specific details that clearly apply only to himself (such as “You unfortunately blew 100% of your film’s budget on your trip to Rome,” where he went to see the 2,100-year-old concrete dome that sits atop the Pantheon). Before settling on concrete as the loosely unifying theme — the cement that binds “the stuff you like” wedged into the film — Wilson bemoans the end of his HBO series and the dwindling residual checks it brings.
Bored — which manifests itself more as bemused curiosity, as Wilson collects whatever absurdities catch his interest — he decides to attend the only class the Writers Guild offered during the 2023 strike: “How to Sell and Write a Hallmark Movie.” Wilson has no intention of making one of those cookie-cutter made-for-TV romances, but it’s amusing to infiltrate the spaces where the formula is shared, followed by a trek to a dreary Canadian soundstage where those dreams are spun from recycled props. You can bet that Wilson will refer back to the emotional tricks he learned in class later in his own film, even as pretty much everything else about his approach rejects the “aspirational escapism” Hallmark movies offer.
Armed with his handheld Sony camera (or else his iPhone in a pinch), Wilson seems to be rolling at all times, obsessively collecting and chronicling a world from which the device serves a paradoxical function. On one hand, it serves as an invitation for strangers to engage with him, but it’s also a convenient social buffer, delivering a certain ironic distance (room for him to insert sarcasm and judgment in the edit). In the tradition of essay filmmakers like Ross McElwee and Kirsten Johnson, Wilson uses the camera to comment on the world around him, as well as to process his own life choices, building in dead ends, exasperating detours and other shameless digressions for comedic effect — the more random they seem, the more amusing audiences are apt to find them (and the more satisfying, when he finds a way to make those tangents relevant).
Does Wilson really care about concrete? I’m not sure it matters, as the topic provides all the excuse he needs to venture out and pose questions to complete strangers. For example, anyone who has lived in New York City is likely to have noticed the countless chewing gum stains that besmirch the city’s sidewalks. “Gum is like the bird shit of people,” Wilson muses, observing patterns of how and where humans spit out their chud before going out of his way to track down a guy dedicated to blasting discarded wads off the otherwise pristine concrete. “That gum is busted,” the man beams after each successful removal.
With this sequence, Wilson has answered a question you probably never thought to ask, stitching together the weird tangents his brain follows with wry voice-over. It can be hard to follow how the easily distracted director gets from one thought to the next, as in a visit to Bellefontaine, Ohio, to observe the oldest concrete street in America. Wilson interviews a driving instructor, who introduces him to a woman who keeps a swatch of her husband’s skin framed on her wall. That leads Wilson to interview the company that specializes in preserving the tattoos of dead loved ones, and down the rabbit hole he goes.
At times, Wilson teases himself for not being a more sophisticated director, jumping around from the concrete hand- and footprints outside Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre to an unreleased DMX Christmas album. Looking for a way to raise fresh funds for the meandering project (based on a bad joke about it being a “rockumentary”), Wilson goes looking for a working musician with a compelling personal tragedy. He lands on Jack Macco, lead singer of the obscure heavy metal band Nebulus, whom he meets offering free samples at his neighborhood liquor store. Elsewhere in Queens, Wilson observes the contestants in guru Sri Chinmoy’s 3,100-mile self-transcendence race, who circle the same stretch of concrete for weeks on end.
Are we dealing with a comedic genius here or some kind of buffoon? The day before seeing “The History of Concrete,” I made a guest appearance at a seminar on Agnès Varda at CalArts, where a student described the French director’s work as “deceptively naive” — the perfect phrase to encapsulate the way Varda assembled “The Gleaners and I,” an intricate essay film so intuitive people often mistake it for being simple. Is Wilson capable of such low-key sophistication? Not really, but he does recognize (the way Hallmark movie writers and AI predictive language models do) how circling around to and ultimately cementing one or two solid ideas can excuse the cracks in an otherwise frivolous endeavor.
English (US) ·