John Wilson’s Frivolous Doc Experiment

With “The History of Concrete,” John Wilson takes the least fascinating topic conceivable — the boring grey composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and pretentious artwork movies like “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s prone to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Trying to extract laughs (and deeper insights, every so often) from a free-associative take a look at people and tasks with ties of some sort to the ugly constructing materials, Wilson feigns curiosity in “something that occupies so much of your visual environment,” presenting what appears like a parody of nonfiction filmmaking (the loosely structured essay kind, at the very least).

A key conceit of “The History of Concrete” is that nobody of their proper thoughts would finance such a movie, a lot less wish to watch it. The helmer (and host of HBO’s “How To With John Wilson”) would also such as you to assume he’s completely unqualified to supervise such a project. And yet, right here it’s, premiering on opening evening of Sundance’s final version in Park City, Utah. Unless you’re employed for the concrete trade (and those seem like enjoyable people, from a go to to a Las Vegas conference), it’s laborious to think about you saying, “Enough with the jokes. Tell us more about concrete!”

Wilson opens the movie in his signature second-person type, telling you what “you” are experiencing in his nasal New York accent, utilizing ultra-specific particulars that clearly apply only to himself (such as “You unfortunately blew 100% of your film’s budget on your trip to Rome,” the place he went to see the 2,100-year-old concrete dome that sits atop the Pantheon). Before deciding on concrete as the loosely unifying theme — the cement that binds “the stuff you like” wedged into the movie — Wilson bemoans the end of his HBO sequence and the dwindling residual checks it brings.

Bored — which manifests itself more as bemused curiosity, as Wilson collects no matter absurdities catch his curiosity — he decides to attend the only class the Writers Guild provided during the 2023 strike: “How to Sell and Write a Hallmark Movie.” Wilson has no intention of constructing considered one of those cookie-cutter made-for-TV romances, nevertheless it’s amusing to infiltrate the areas the place the formulation is shared, adopted by a trek to a dreary Canadian soundstage the place those goals are spun from recycled props. You can guess that Wilson will refer again to the emotional methods he discovered at school later in his personal movie, even as just about every part else about his strategy rejects the “aspirational escapism” Hallmark motion pictures supply.

Armed along with his handheld Sony digicam (or else his iPhone in a pinch), Wilson appears to be rolling always, obsessively accumulating and chronicling a world from which the device serves a paradoxical perform. On one hand, it serves as an invite for strangers to interact with him, nevertheless it’s also a handy social buffer, delivering a sure ironic distance (room for him to insert sarcasm and judgment in the edit). In the custom of essay filmmakers like Ross McElwee and Kirsten Johnson, Wilson makes use of the digicam to touch upon the world round him, in addition to to course of his personal life decisions, constructing in lifeless ends, exasperating detours and other shameless digressions for comedic impact — the more random they appear, the more amusing audiences are apt to search out them (and the more satisfying, when he finds a approach to make those tangents related).

Does Wilson actually care about concrete? I’m unsure it issues, as the subject gives all the excuse he must enterprise out and pose questions to finish strangers. For instance, anybody who has lived in New York City is prone to have observed the numerous chewing gum stains that besmirch the metropolis’s sidewalks. “Gum is like the bird shit of people,” Wilson muses, observing patterns of how and the place people spit out their chud before going out of his approach to observe down a man devoted to blasting discarded wads off the in any other case pristine concrete. “That gum is busted,” the man beams after each profitable elimination.

With this sequence, Wilson has answered a query you most likely never thought to ask, stitching together the bizarre tangents his mind follows with wry voice-over. It could be laborious to observe how the simply distracted director will get from one thought to the next, as in a go to to Bellefontaine, Ohio, to watch the oldest concrete avenue in America. Wilson interviews a driving teacher, who introduces him to a lady who retains a swatch of her husband’s skin framed on her wall. That leads Wilson to interview the company that focuses on preserving the tattoos of lifeless family members, and down the rabbit gap he goes.

At occasions, Wilson teases himself for not being a more subtle director, leaping round from the concrete hand- and footprints exterior Hollywood’s well-known Chinese Theatre to an unreleased DMX Christmas album. Looking for a approach to increase recent funds for the meandering project (based on a foul joke about it being a “rockumentary”), Wilson goes on the lookout for a working musician with a compelling private tragedy. He lands on Jack Macco, lead singer of the obscure heavy metallic band Nebulus, whom he meets providing free samples at his neighborhood liquor retailer. Elsewhere in Queens, Wilson observes the contestants in guru Sri Chinmoy’s 3,100-mile self-transcendence race, who circle the same stretch of concrete for weeks on end.

Are we coping with a comedic genius right here or some form of buffoon? The day before seeing “The History of Concrete,” I made a visitor look at a seminar on Agnès Varda at CalArts, the place a scholar described the French director’s work as “deceptively naive” — the good phrase to encapsulate the manner Varda assembled “The Gleaners and I,” an intricate essay movie so intuitive people often mistake it for being simple. Is Wilson able to such low-key sophistication? Not actually, however he does acknowledge (the manner Hallmark film writers and AI predictive language fashions do) how circling round to and in the end cementing one or two strong concepts can excuse the cracks in an in any other case frivolous endeavor.