The History of Concrete review – John Wilson’s first movie is an absurd triumph

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Sundance film festival: the documentarian’s feature debut, essentially an extended episode of his HBO series, turns an exploration of concrete into a meditation on change For those in the know, the release of the Sundance film festival lineup last December contained one perfect, tantalizing log line, for a documentary plainly called The History of Concrete: “After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete.” Wilson, a film-maker from the Nathan Fielder school of meandering, bone-dry observational comedy, is a master of the modern documentary-essay-memoir, with an uncanny eye for the idiosyncratic, unintentionally hilarious and disturbing vignettes hiding in plain sight. Over three near-perfect seasons, his peerless HBO series How To With John Wilson , executive-produced by Fielder, spun spoofs of practical guides (“How to Cook the Perfect Risotto”) into profound meditations...
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‘Life can be complicated’: Rachel Weisz on balancing privacy with stardom

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Her latest TV series calls for her to play both twins in a reworking of Cronenberg’s dark and bloody classic, Dead Ringers. But Rachel Weisz, the famously private Oscar-winner, is used to stepping in and out of roles

There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.

In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.

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