John Wilson once made a deeply moving episode of television about how to cover your furniture. Another one about how to make risotto that somehow ended up being about loneliness. Now he’s made a feature film about concrete — and released the first teaser for it this week, confirming a theatrical run through Magnolia Pictures starting next month.
The teaser, which arrived without narration, is unmistakably Wilson’s work: handheld footage of concrete mixers, potholes, anonymous buildings, and the kind of unremarkable New York streetscapes that his How To with John Wilson HBO series trained three seasons of viewers to look at more carefully, AV Club confirmed. The film itself runs 100 minutes and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it played opening night of the festival’s final edition in Park City, Utah.
The premise works both as a genuine documentary subject and as a punchline to a joke Wilson sets up immediately. In the film, he bemoans the end of How To and the steadily shrinking residual checks it generates, attends a seminar on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, and then attempts to apply that feel-good formula to a documentary about the world’s most widely used building material. His agent appears on Zoom looking baffled. Potential funders pass. Wilson makes the film anyway, FirstShowing reported after seeing it in January.
That self-aware meta structure — the movie about the struggle to make a movie — draws an obvious line to Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and more distantly to Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, but the comparison that keeps coming up in early reviews is simply Wilson himself, since the format is less borrowed than evolved directly from his television work. The Guardian called it “an absurd triumph” at Sundance. Variety’s review described it as a DIY parody of nonfiction filmmaking that somehow lands both the jokes and something deeper underneath them, Variety noted. The Letterboxd consensus after Sundance pointed to the film’s formal ambition — the way Wilson structures the documentary to mimic the actual properties of concrete on a narrative level — as its most impressive trick.
Produced by Clark Filio, Shirel Kozak, and Allie Viti, with Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, and Ronald Bronstein serving as executive producers, the film was shot by Nellie Kluz and edited by Cori Wapnowska, per Wikipedia. The Safdie brothers’ involvement isn’t incidental — Josh Safdie has been a vocal supporter of Wilson’s work since the early seasons of How To, and his executive producer credit here reads as a genuine act of championing a filmmaker he believes in.
What the film is actually about, in the way Wilson’s work is always actually about something other than its stated subject, is harder to summarize cleanly. CPH:DOX, which programmed the film after Sundance, put it plainly: Wilson finds the strangest and most absurd truths in the most mundane things, and concrete turns out to be an unusually good vessel for that — touching impermanence, city planning, climate change, and the relationship between what we build and what we leave behind, before inevitably wandering somewhere else entirely.
Magnolia Pictures will release The History of Concrete theatrically in September. No specific date has been confirmed beyond next month.
