By Thomas M. Puhr.
It would be all-too-easy to criticize Wilson for both his scattershot approach and seeming off-the-cuff attitude… but a mandala-like design ties everything into a cohesive whole.”
Dank water floods a gym locker room. A dog pukes from the window of a speeding car. A self-driving delivery robot carefully steers around a homeless man. Much like his remarkable short-form work, John Wilson’s The History of Concrete (2026) teems with vérité-style footage of the absurdity that is big-city life. Anyone familiar with the documentarian’s style, however, knows that he also excels at finding little moments of beauty. Case in point: a shot of a hole-riddled New York City sidewalk that denizens filled with goldfish and turned into a makeshift aquarium. This playful image encapsulates Wilson’s central interest: the human drive to create in the face of impermanence. It’s making lemonade with lemons, as one interviewee succinctly puts it. Because what else are you supposed to do?
The film begins with our hero at a crossroads. While the HBO series How to with John Wilson (2020-2023) has bought him some celebrity capital (but not enough for any of the contestants on a Jeopardy! episode to recognize him, as one clip hilariously illustrates), his professional opportunities are dwindling almost as quickly as the dollar amounts on his royalty checks. Desperate for inspiration—and limited in his options, given an ongoing writers’ strike—he signs up for a workshop on how to write a Hallmark Christmas movie. Perhaps, he surmises, the schmaltzy network’s tried-and-true formula (big-city girl returns to her small town, has a meet cute with a man who is her exact opposite, saves a local business, etc.) will help him pitch his gestating concrete documentary to investors.
As is often the case with Wilson, his conceit’s superficial cheekiness (the film poster shows a cinderblock adorned with a puffy red ribbon) contains some actual truth once you pick at it a little; after all, aren’t Hallmark movies and concrete defined by a similar cultural ubiquity and flavorless uniformity? As is also often the case with the director, it’s unclear how much of his setup is sincere, let alone real; how prospect-less can this guy be if he hangs out with the likes of Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson and snagged Josh Safdie as an executive producer for his feature debut?
Of course, the film isn’t really about concrete, just as none of his how-to tutorials are about the things he’s nominally teaching us. The topic is more of a symbolic center around which Wilson’s far-ranging, interconnecting investigative interests—from the philosophical (death, impermanence) to the political (affordable housing, AI) to the outlandishly speculative (Mars colonization)—orbit. Part of the fun, then, is in following the circuitous path he takes us on and marveling at his ability to bring things full circle in the most unexpected (and often quite touching) ways. A trip to the Emmys, for example, leads to a commentary on the popular “rock doc” subgenre—specifically, the 2021 feature DMX: Don’t Try to Understand. When an interviewee later mentions how his late fiancé prosecuted DMX for impersonating a police officer, our ears perk up; and when DMX’s “Silent Night”—from his infamous, never-completed Christmas album (remember, this film is also a quasi-holiday affair)—accompanies the end credits, we cackle with glee. Somehow, these little touches feel more like a tribute to the late, great rapper than a dig. Such is Wilson’s tonal mastery.
Although the film is often uproariously funny (that DMX needle-drop really brought the house down at my local theater), some of its best moments come when Wilson takes a more contemplative approach. Consider his juxtaposition of Eric Adams and his acolytes celebrating the passage of a bill to construct more properties with a Buddhist sand mandala ceremony; as the monks brush away the intricate design, we’re reminded that the fruits of the then-mayor’s ambitions will one day return to dust. Or his fascination with the so-called Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, a fifty-two day athletic competition in which runners circle the same city block in Queens countless times. With these two examples in mind, The History of Concrete may very well be the director’s most explicitly spiritual work yet.
It would be all-too-easy to criticize Wilson for both his scattershot approach and seeming off-the-cuff attitude (his trademark casual narration begins with a “Hey” and ends with a shrug-like “That’s it”), but a mandala-like design ties everything into a cohesive whole. There’s something almost stubborn about his (Sisyphean? Self-Sabotaging?) quest to somehow make an interesting movie about concrete. Like the Self-Transcendence race’s small but dedicated fanbase, he obsessively pursues a single idea until it yields new insights and interpretive angles. And shouldn’t we all strive to see the world with new eyes, this method suggests, before it’s inevitably blown away?
Doesn’t anything connect to everything if you look at it long enough?
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press. His study of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers is forthcoming from Channel Academic Publishing.