Concrete Turned to Sand (2026)
I will be upfront about this one: Concrete Turned to Sand is a film built on an aesthetic I simply do not connect with, and no amount of good intentions could win me round. It is a slow, austere, deliberately anti-narrative piece of observational cinema, and while I can see exactly what Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora are reaching for, it left me cold, restless and unmoved. For me, and I stress for me, it is a one and a half star experience.
I was warned beforehand that it was punishingly dark and best seen in a cinema, and they were not exaggerating. I watched it in my home cinema and still found the opening close to impenetrable. The first eight minutes or so are near pitch-black, no dialogue, not even a score, just murky images of water and shoreline drifting by. Then come another ten minutes of an oyster farmer quietly going about their work, and it is only around the eighteen-minute mark that a human voice finally arrives.
And even then, the film keeps you at arm's length by design. It is fly-on-the-wall to an almost perverse degree, so that when people do speak we rarely see them. Instead we eavesdrop on snatches of conversation while the camera lingers on oysters with water running over them. There is no story, no argument, no character to hold onto, just a theme, the changing intertidal world of these shellfish beds, rendered as an hour-long drift across an oyster vessel without ever really engaging with a single person aboard.
It sits in a recognisable tradition, the kind of sensory, slow-cinema documentary that strips away narration, music and incident in favour of pure observation, the same lineage as those experimental pieces that trace, say, the long death of a boat on its way to the breaker's yard, or assemble a film entirely out of fragments and signs. I know this style has passionate admirers, people who find something meditative and profound in that stillness, and I have no doubt they will connect with this far more than I did. If immersive, plotless, texture-first cinema is your thing, add a star or two and seek it out.
But honesty is the job, and honestly it did nothing for me. I was not engaged, I was not moved, I did not find it interesting or beautiful enough to carry its own emptiness. I learned nothing I could hold onto, there was no revelation and nothing to unsettle me, just a long, dark, deliberate withholding. The ocean-acidification theme underpinning it is a genuinely important one, which makes it all the more frustrating that the film seemed so uninterested in actually telling me anything about it.
One and a half stars. Concrete Turned to Sand is a rigorous, uncompromising mood piece that will reward a particular kind of patient, contemplative viewer, and I respect the purity of its intentions even as I bounced clean off it. It is simply not a film for me, and I would gently steer anyone who likes a documentary to inform, engage or move them well clear.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Canada: The Butterfly Effect (2004), A Special Day (1977), Land of the Dead (2005)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More documentary: Mon Taxi (2026), Kikuyu Land (2026), Bel (2026)
