The History of Concrete
(2026 | USA | John Wilson | 101 min)

Courtesy of Sundance Institute. | photo by John Wilson

John Wilson’s first feature-length documentary could have been titled How To Make A Movie With John Wilson. Adrift and uncertain about what to do after closing the book on making multiple seasons of television for HBO (and seeing the royalty checks dwindle to single digits), he finds himself looking at the world around him in search of his next project. As it turns out, we are surrounded by concrete. While it’s hardly a topic to instantly open the pocketbooks of potential funders, it is nevertheless one that opens Wilson’s eyes to the quirks and characters of the world around him.

Loosely constructed around the ubiquitous building material, the film is less a tutorial than a wide-ranging meditation on inevitable decay. An initial foray into finding direction brings him to a seminar about the structures of writing a Hallmark movie, but the prescribed paradigm doesn’t really stick. Like an extended edition of his show, the documentary is abundant with nonstop visual jokes built from a deep library of intricately cut clips of the mundane. But the laugh-per-minute format would be quickly exhausting were it not accompanied by Wilson’s trademark wide-ranging curiosity.

Construction nerds expecting a deep dive into the history of construction materials or Wiseman-iacs hoping for a carefully focused observation of an essential component of modern infrastructure will surely be unsettled by Wilson’s scattershot approach. Fans of his second-person diaristic narration, facility for pointing a digital video camera at anything and anyone that catches his attention, extreme digressions, and haltingly arrhythmic meta-commentary will find themselves in heaven.

The extended runtime affords a freedom to trot the globe — from a budget-busting expedition to Italy, to a future-looking series of concrete industry conventions– as well as to find poetry in disappearing parks, live music venues, and his own flooding basement of his NYC home. From wandering onto the set of Marty Supreme to an inexplicable invitation to a Chateau Marmont GQ dinner, there are a handful of stunning celebrity cameos (Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi, Kim Kardashian, and even Tim Robinson) to remind us of the vaunted circles that Wilson still inhabits.

Still, his interests are primarily with the everyday oddities. A visit to the oldest concrete road in Ohio somehow swerves to an unshakeable interview with a man who has pivoted his family’s funeral business into the preservation of post-mortem tattoos. A look at the crumbling infrastructure of New York’s swimming pools reveals the policies and procedures for different categories of defecation cleanup protocols. The nature of concrete is explored via the punishing nature of a group of fanatics running around a city block of it from dawn until midnight for thousands of miles of laps while a cult leader’s devotees encourage them with song. Along the way, vaguely in search of making his movie into a “rock”-umentary, Wilson strikes up a moving friendship with a local liquor promoter whose band has found a kind of success by splitting their time between originals and covers.

For me, the loosely poured structure never quite set into something unified and profound. Instead, ways both funny and sad, each of these threads fragments becomes a lens on an overall theme of impermanence. Rather than resolving to a singular profound conclusion, the film instead documents a practice of searching for what to do next in the absence of structure and the certainty that nothing lasts forever.

The History of Concrete played as an official selection of the Premieres Section at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.