Review: The History of Concrete (2026)

John Wilson’s The History of Concrete is essentially a feature length episode of his cult HBO show How To with John Wilson, which ran three seasons from 2020 to 2023. This is mostly for good, but the approach has a few drawbacks. On the plus side, it means we get the same dry narration overtop of his mosaic of footage capturing ordinary life on the streets of New York City. We get the same absurd non sequiturs, ironic juxtapositions of narration and image, and surprising detours that venture far, far off the path of expectation. The film is hilarious, occasionally startling, and deeply weird.

We also get much more of Wilson’s shtick than usual, with a structure and pacing that can lag at times. The joke with Wilson’s television episodes is that they’re never actually about what they purport to be about—so don’t expect an actual history of concrete with his feature debut. But the television episodes are each 25 minutes long. On his TV show, Wilson is deft at sustaining our interest with his endless digressions and tangents, but he never had to sustain things for this long. The History of Concrete runs 101 minutes, and with this longer feature format, the lack of narrative focus becomes more obvious, and the irony and awkward tension sometimes strain in ways they never did on the television show.

Kudos, at least, to Wilson for staying true to his artistic approach. The approach is also fitting, as this film is somewhat about its own creation, as it depicts Wilson’s struggle to come up with a follow-up project after his HBO show ended. During the 2023 Writer’s Strike, he attends a workshop to learn how to write a Hallmark movie, and he decides he’s going to subtly apply this formula to a documentary about concrete. Of course, that’s not really what The History of Concrete is about, either. Wilson shows us some hidden camera footage of the workshop, and we can see how he ironically applies some of the core lessons of the workshop into his film’s structure, but explaining the film as simply Wilson riffing on the Hallmark formula is inaccurate and completely inadequate in describing the film’s approach.

Much of The History of Concrete betrays Wilson’s artistic anxiety over lacking a clear agenda for his next work—you get narration about not knowing how to follow-up his success and lots of anxious handheld shots meandering around New York. In the absence of finding a captivating subject amid the streets of New York, Wilson ends up making the literal connective tissue of the city and its streets his subject: concrete. Concrete is everywhere. Both here and in his television series, Wilson’s camera is obsessed with the physical spaces and urban environments of New York City. He films random spots on the ground, strange potholes in the streets, and people interacting with the city, whether in a public square or a park or a street corner. He comes about his esoteric themes in the editing process, but the actual footage is fixated on the real world, and the real people who inhabit it. So it makes sense that Wilson’s interest would gravitate toward something that physically connects everyone, but which no one ever thinks about.

In his so-called exploration of concrete, we get humorous detours where Wilson goes to Rome to explore the actual history of concrete, and fails to get any insights outside the Pantheon, which was built with an ancient and mysterious substance known as Roman concrete. We get Wilson attending events in Los Angeles, such as a dinner celebrating Kim Kardashian, inexplicably, which culminates with the film’s biggest laugh: Wilson’s cheers with a truly left-field celebrity sitting across from him. And we get what Wilson does best, which is wander through New York, meet oddballs, film weird moments, ask people questions they don’t normally get asked and then follow them through until he gets a much bigger answer than he ever could’ve imagined.

Most affectingly, Wilson meets a middle-aged man working at a liquor store handing out samples and strikes up a conversation with him. The man reveals that he’s in a hard rock band and so, of course, Wilson ends up at his show. But the saga doesn’t end there. He goes back to his home, catches up with him periodically in the months to follow, both at his day job and at his gigs. He learns about his long-term relationship and even accompanies him to the Montauk music festival, which coincides with the night the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship.

The entire narrative detour personifies Wilson’s gifts. Wilson is awkward and rather inarticulate when talking to other people, but he’s also endlessly curious and uses the camera as a means to diffuse his own anxiety and create the opportunity to connect with other people. So he asks questions and he watches and listens and, when given such attention, people open up. It’s the heart-warming, empathetic yang to the narcissistic, self-destructive yin of reality TV and social media, where people amplify their worst qualities to get as much attention as possible. Wilson is able to disarm people, so he gets them at their most unassuming and, often, best.

It’s a pleasure to meet these people alongside Wilson, following his digressions, learning weird esoteric facts about the city of New York and the world of concrete and simply the world of the 21st century. But you cannot escape the lingering notion that perhaps The History of Concrete is basically just season four of How To with John Wilson mashed up into a feature film. Also, to be rather blunt, Wilson’s handheld HD camera is better suited to the small screen than the theatrical format. He’s not interested in lighting or framing, simply capturing, so when projected in a theatre, the film can be rather ugly. Its visuals are washed out and grey, which probably wouldn’t rankle on the small screen, but can be a bit of an eyesore on a big one.

I’m nevertheless glad to take this journey with Wilson. He’s truly one-of-a-kind. But I’d love to experience a truly new format for Wilson’s next venture, rather than a reassembly of what he’s done before, even if he continues to do it well.

7 out of 10

The History of Concrete (2026, USA)

Directed by John Wilson.

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