By Jason Osiason

The History of Concrete drops you straight into John Wilson’s post project spiral as he wrestles with the question of whether his strange little observational formula can actually survive its jump to a feature film. The whole movie feels like being trapped inside his brain while he debates pushing that formula forward or abandoning it entirely.

From there we disappear down a bizarre rabbit hole. Concrete becomes the starting point but the film keeps branching outward. It moves through Hollywood pitch logic, storytelling formulas, the strange emotional architecture of Hallmark movies, and then into the truly weird corners of the world that only Wilson seems able to find.

My favorite detour involves people who preserve the tattoos of loved ones after they die by literally cutting the skin off and framing it. It is exactly the kind of morbid, oddly tender human behavior Wilson has built his entire career documenting. You watch it half fascinated and half wondering how on earth he found these people.

But what makes that section hit harder is how it ties back into the film’s central theme. The whole movie quietly circles around the idea of people trying to leave some mark behind. Concrete structures meant to outlive us. Workers pressing gum into the ground or scratching marks into wet surfaces before they harden. Tattoos etched permanently into skin. And then, in the strangest possible extension of that idea, tattoos preserved after death like relics.

It is all about permanence and memory. The human instinct to resist disappearing.

The film definitely has pacing issues at feature length. Wilson’s episodic wandering style is perfect for television but occasionally drifts here when stretched across a full runtime. Still, the film ultimately lands on something satisfying. It feels like Wilson confronting the question of formula head on and then deciding to own it.

By the end it feels less like he escaped the spiral and more like he embraced it.

Honestly, I would watch one of these every year. [B+]