Rating: NR | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: September 18th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Director(s): John Wilson

Looks like a fruitcake.

What do you do when your Emmy-nominated HBO series finishes its run? Do you rest on your laurels and become a landlord for your friends in a slowly deteriorating building? Yes. Do you attend a WGA strike-era seminar on how to write a successful Hallmark movie? Yes. Do you get ambitious enough to simply film everything and everywhere until you realize the subject of a new project no one thinks can be stretched to feature length has been staring you in the face?

John Wilson doesn’t know it until he can’t stop seeing it, but he cannot escape concrete. Whether the damage in that building that he attempts to fix with the wrong compound or the nondescript structure housing Hallmark’s barebones studios or crack-filled blocks under his feet wherever he walks, this mixture of cement, water, sand, and rock is as prevalent as oxygen. So, why not delve into the subject? Why not give this ubiquitous material its cinematic due?

The easy answer is money. No one wants to finance The History of Concrete. No one except someone who took his “rock documentary” joke seriously. Maybe they would he if actually was Ari Aster (an aspiring actor working on a short film with a current concrete salesman thinks he’s the spitting image), but this horror—the one inherent to decaying infrastructure and being the third highest contributor to climate change—isn’t starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Not that this meandering enterprise with more segues than a scooter store (I think Wilson would appreciate the imagery considering his voiceover talks about “shuddering” while images of house “shutters” are shown on-screen) doesn’t have its fair share of celebrity sightings courtesy of an inexplicable invitation to GQ‘s Man of the Year party for Kim Kardashian. She’s sitting at his table next to Jacob Elordi. Tom Ford is behind him. Tim Robinson clinks his glass.

What’s their connection to concrete? None. It’s all part of a journey taking Wilson to relevant subjects (contractors whose accents beg for a sex joke anytime they say “cement”) and non-relevant asides (the enigmatic Jack Macco who might just be the most interesting man alive and a compulsive liar). One topic leads to the next with concrete tangentially connecting them all to varying degrees. It’s the springboard towards metaphor, humor, and nonsense.

I must admit I wasn’t familiar with Wilson’s work before watching, so I can only say fans have been raving about what they’re calling an extended “How to” episode if not three episodes in one. He speaks in second person about himself with the word “you” while recounting and describing the situations he finds himself in by choice and/or at random. He interacts with his subjects in a way that takes them seriously, but the edit always augments the absurdity anyway.

It’s an intriguing space to exist in as a viewer because you are in fact laughing at these people rather than with them. Yet we still see them as three-dimensional human beings who deserve our respect. So, it’s not cringe comedy as much as it is anecdotally situational. Rather than having someone tell you the story, though, we’re watching it unfold for ourselves. We’re therefore able to appreciate the humor without also dismissing the target. It’s quite brilliant.

Because truth is always stranger than fiction. You can’t make-up a guy whose livelihood is pressure-washing gum off the pavement that gifts his friends and customers with bottles of wine wrapped in a “gum buster” label. These are real people surviving a deteriorating world like the rest of us. Those whose financial solvency is predicated on concrete’s pervasiveness and those who see it as the bane of their existence (runners and victims to its dust when recycled).

Beyond these people as authorities, punch lines, and mirrors unto ourselves, however, The History of Concrete is also an auto-biographical account of how impossible it is to make a film these days without compromising your artistic ambitions for an immovable set of rules investors believe to be necessary to make a profit. The cracks in walls signal the inevitability of change. Patches and fills signal the desire for bland homogeneity over singular boldness.

So, think of this documentary as one man pushing back against the inevitable drab gray of a content mill like Hallmark. Sure, concrete is the epitome of the mundane, but only if you refuse to engage with its historical utility and inherent impermanence (planned or otherwise). What happens within those concrete buildings? How much fun can you have blowing your budget in Italy asking strangers stupid questions about concrete? How does it parallel humanity?

The film is therefore using concrete as the impetus for Wilson to make a film about his current emotional, psychological, and artistic state of being. I have a feeling all his work does the same, but, unlike Hallmark repeating the same plot in different packages, he’s repeating the same schtick with different subjects that in turn hit upon different parts of his own existential yearning for purpose. If he can do it with concrete, he can do it with anything.

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John Wilson in THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.