The History of Concrete: John Wilson expands his eccentric TV series into a sneakily profound debut

• Reviewed from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival

For three wonderful seasons, John Wilson’s How To shorts series on HBO and BBC iPlayer felt like something we were collectively getting away with – a funny and compassionate filmmaker unleashed upon a messy city with a team of cameras, a premium cable budget, and a digressive inability to be uninteresting. Wilson’s debut feature The History of Concrete shows the expert essayist as sneakily profound as ever, contemplating life and art and piecing together meaning from the fragments. 

As we continue to drown in social media clips and bits, Wilson’s ingenious shorts could gently reattune hearts and minds to what surrounds us, while fending off pretension. His feature begins with the native New Yorker at customary loose ends, trying to launch the post-HBO film we are essentially watching, in what’s both an artistic and existential predicament – how to stay alive in a world that keeps feeding us routine and hustle. Titling a project The History of Concrete is Wilson doubling down on drilling down.  

Coming off a serial format, Wilson is naturally concerned about repeating himself. But as with his past seemingly mundane ‘how to’ subject choices, Wilson reaches for what sounds like a conventional variation on a theme – say, visiting the world’s oldest concrete, in Rome – and pulls a rabbit out of a hat. His voiceover one-liner about the ruins contains a whole other potential movie about the past: “They decided to leave it at this exact level of fucked-up.” And when he attends a Writers Guild presentation on how to write Hallmark movies, it’s hilarious, dismaying, and somehow human – a formalisation of romantic narratives that, at the same time, many embrace as comfort food.  

Concrete becomes its own weirdly beguiling metaphor, opening up questions of permanence and how we face mortality (or don’t). On a trip to Ohio to visit the oldest concrete street in America, Wilson drops in on Save My Ink Forever, a business that preserves the tattooed skin of loved ones – a macabre practice, yet it signifies a human urge to hold onto someone’s memory. If that sounds pretentious, Wilson also delightedly includes a sequence on the Gumbusters guy, who blasts sidewalks clean of spat-out semi-fossilised Wrigley’s chewing gum globs. It’s a job, much as Wilson’s is (and he eagerly tries his hand at cleaning and grins delivering the catch phrase: “That gum is busted”). 

At this point in recounting the episodic film, it’s easy for a critic to feel like Wilson himself when he must pitch his project to potential funders, something we see in a glimpse of futile-feeling Zoom sessions. The History of Concrete unfolds in a where-is-this-going flow of discovery, not wholly dissimilar from the differently circling methods of two Wilson idols, Frederick Wiseman and Richard Linklater. There’s a delicate balance to his technique, which involves a certain undercover discipline to avoid flying apart, while retaining a certain intuitive freedom, like a tarot reading of reality. (One admirer compared the feel of Wilson’s film to an elegant waiter that glides along after stepping on a rollerskate, which is a fun way of noticing the skill that belies his work’s self-deprecating authorial voice.) 

The History of Concrete has a fascinatingly ambivalent view toward the communities we form – the film keeps returning to a curious religious group that stages a gruelling marathon around a single Queens city block, while a business convention he visits has an unnerving single-mindedness whereby, whatever the question, concrete is the answer. As in Wilson’s HBO show, there comes a point when the film alights to focus on an individual: here it’s an unassuming ageing rocker whom Wilson first sees doling out wine samples at a store in Montauk. His story yields a moving conclusion about connection and loss that upends expectations once more. 

It’s easy to worry whether Wilson has essentially beaded together multiple episodes into a feature, but it’s also a filmmaker showing his work. To borrow another urban metaphor, The History of Concrete evokes a mystery subway ride with several, often strange stops, plenty of people to look at and wonder about, and moments of spacing out and reflecting. Wilson dodges the pitfall of some nonfiction meditations (including maybe a couple at this year’s Sundance) that feel tethered to a conceit, rather than inspired to roam. Whatever it’s about, Wilson’s movies are also about joining another human who is trying to figure things out, sometimes from the ground up.