‘The Oldest Person in the World’ Review: A Cute Documentary About 116-Year-Olds Takes a Rewardingly Personal Turn

Sundance: It turns out that centenarians don't make for the most riveting interview subjects, but Sam Green's film gleans a real poignancy from what they have to say.

At the start of “The Oldest Person in the World,” director Sam Green (“32 Sounds”) plainly confesses, “At the beginning of making a movie I never know what I’m doing or why.” By the end of his latest documentary, which is billed as the first part of a decennial series in the vein of Michael Apted’s “Up” saga, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that Green had figured that out for himself. And yet, I wasn’t really bothered by that either. 

A heartfelt, wistful, and aggressively poignant collection of interviews with seven different 116 and 117-year-olds who, at the time of filming, are recognized as the single most aged individuals on planet Earth (a title that has a funny way of changing hands on a semi-regular basis), Green’s project introduces itself with the shaky premise that everyone shares his passion for the oldest people in the world. “Why are we so captivated by this one person who has been around longer than anyone else?,” he asks in his slow and singsongy voice, which brims with manufactured wonder and narrates almost every minute of the film.

And my immediate answer to that question was simply: We aren’t. 

Just because their deaths make for good local news fodder doesn’t mean that most of us have a special fascination with these centenarian record-holders. Frankly, most of them are a lot more interesting in theory than they are in conversation. Green spontaneously visits his first oldest person when he hears that her public birthday celebration is being held near his apartment in Brooklyn, but when he gets there he finds that Susannah Mushatt Jones is fast asleep in front of her cake.

Not only does Jones fail to wake up before everyone goes home, but Green has to listen to then-mayor Eric Adams give a presumably deranged speech about her life (and probably also, like, Istanbul and the magic of wheeled trash bins). That was in the summer of 2015, and while subsequent interviews the filmmaker conducted over the next 10 years are more lucid, several of them impressively so, but none of their semi-intact memories or non-advice about fending off the grim reaper are more compelling than the sheer fact of their longevity. 

Having said that, “The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand. Just when it seems like the documentary will be little more than a succession of people born in the 19th century or able to recall a Lord Byron poem they first memorized 107 years earlier, Green swivels the camera around and makes himself the film’s truest subject. The navel-gazing nature of his voiceover narration lends that pivot a feeling of inevitability, but Green is such an open-hearted and genuine searcher that I couldn’t bring myself to begrudge him that. 

He began shooting “The Oldest Person in the World” just a few years after his brother committed suicide, and — though he didn’t know it yet — also just a few years before he would create life for the first time (an adorable son named Atlas), and suffer a grievous threat to his own (a multiple myeloma diagnosis). Mortality becomes a far clearer and more present danger as you slouch towards 50, and the series of tragedies, miracles, and unexpected crises that Green experienced on the way there naturally galvanized his latent interest in the most amount of time he might possibly have left. 

How long is 125 years, which the Hayflick Limit suggests is the most extreme end of the human lifespan? It’s the blink of an eye, but, to see what time has done to the bodies of people who’ve almost bumped against that ceiling, it might also be far too long. Observing that everyone gets to be the youngest person on Earth for at least a split-second, Green begins documenting his son’s childhood as a kind of counterbalance to the rest of this project, and the film becomes a far more substantial thing when it begins to approach oblivion from both sides at once — when it begins to poke at its own theory of relativity. 

Atlas irreversibly grows up before our eyes, while Green barely ages a day over the course of 10 years (despite what he seems to think), and reigning oldest person in the world Kane Tanaka clings onto her title for what feels like forever. Green’s father has been dead for ages, but his 92-year-old mother is still going strong. As the movie flits between these different storylines, time is reframed less as something to resist (or defy) than as something to embrace. It’s the most universal measure of our lifespans, but also something that accelerates, slows, and even stops entirely without warning. 

And while “The Oldest Person in the World” is a bit too unsure of itself to settle for a canned epiphany of some kind (i.e. “it’s not about the amount of days in our life, but the amount of life in our days”), its inability to do so resolves into something vaguely but indivisibly true about the order that we all try to impose upon the chaos and randomness of our time on Earth. I’m unconvinced that a 2036 sequel charting the next 10 years of the filmmaker’s life — and introducing us to the next 10 years of oldest people in the world — will meaningfully iterate on the truths that Green works towards here.

I don’t know if I see the franchise potential here. What I do know is that Green will make another one even if he feels the same way, and I have faith that his uncertainty will yield more enlightening results than a less guarded or indeterminate filmmaker would have any hope to share with us. 

Grade: B-

“The Oldest Person in the World” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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