‘The Oldest Person in the World’ Review: Sam Green Shares a Life-Changing Decade of Thinking About Mortality in Myriad Ways

If life is a contest, the way the folks at Guinness World Records seem to treat it, how exactly does one win? Is it by amassing the most assets? The most wisdom? Some might argue that success comes in living the longest — in outliving all your peers, to put it in slightly more macabre terms — although Sam Green’s delightfully insightful “The Oldest Person in the World” suggests there’s an age at which the gift of life starts to feel … excessive.

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With his sneakily profound and unexpectedly personal new nonfiction project, the filmmaker behind such outside-the-box docs as “32 Sounds” and “A Thousand Thoughts” takes a deep look at the subject of mortality. In the tradition of Agnès Varda (who makes an appearance), he’s determined to glean whatever advice he can collect from the last few people born way back in the 19th century, but also with his own uncertain future, as Green was diagnosed with multiple myeloma during the making of this film.

Back in 2015, the New York-based director realized that the current record holder (Susannah Mushatt Jones, born in 1899) was turning 116 not far from where he lived, in Brooklyn, so he grabbed his camera and headed over to her birthday party. So began a decade-long survey of the world’s oldest souls. Unlike other Guinness feats, no one holds the title for very long.

“At the moment I’m writing this” (to borrow a line from Green’s narration), my grandmother hit the century mark: Yesterday was her 100th birthday, and though I feel blessed that this amazing woman has been with us so long, from the look of things — the frailty and memory failure, the reliance on others for her body’s basic needs — I’m have serious reservations about reaching that same milestone myself one day.

Green confronts those same questions right up front, as he observes Jones dozing through the celebration organized in her honor, barely able to say a few words. Following up with a house visit a short time after, she sleeps through his visit. Early on, Green observes how many of his elderly subjects revert to an almost childlike state — the way they require care and crave physical contact (“That’s what babies want,” notes Jones’ 85-year-old niece). Others are still quite sharp, capable of reciting poems and songs from the long-gone golden days of their youth.

Is there a benefit in living that long, Green provocatively asks. Could the public’s interest in such people be a way of reassuring themselves that death — an inevitability most of us would prefer not to think about — is still a long way down the field? In Green’s case, that reality is staring him in the face, coinciding with the arrival of his son Atlas, “seen here in his very brief moment as the youngest person in the world,” Green says, flashing an image of the newborn baby boy.

Open-hearted without tipping into sentimentality, Green has a frank, slightly skeptical way of looking at the world, which lends itself to the contemplative, slightly sing-songy voiceover he supplies, guiding us through a project with concerns far beyond just aging. Early on, amid a loosely related collage of images, there appears a slow-motion 8-second clip of two young men, smiling for the camera. Later, Green will return to that shot (the only footage he has of his younger brother Dave) as he addresses a significant motivator for making the film: trying to make sense of his sibling’s suicide. What causes some people to live well past 100 and others to take their own lives?

As a good-natured French nun named Sister André tells Green, her God works in mysterious ways: “He lets little children die and beings like me live,” she says, chiding Him for “going too far” where her own lifespan is concerned. Meanwhile, as Atlas grows, Green watches the boy wrap his head around the concept of time — even as the director worries that his own cancer treatment could cut short the number of days he has left.

Traveling around the world, arranging meetings with whoever is the oldest at that particular moment in time, Green struggles to formulate the right questions to ask these people. In most cases, the record holders agree to be interviewed, distilling years of experience into fairly shallow platitudes — pithy advice Green finds understandably unsatisfying.

And then, in Spain, he meets Maria Branyas, a 117-year-old woman with an active Twitter account, who stares directly into the lens and suggests, “You are young. Now is the time to do good works.” It’s hard to imagine better words to live by. (Stay through the end credits for one of her tweets.) In its more philosophical moments, “The Oldest Person in the World” is the best kind of cinematic experience: an entertaining and enlightening “meaning of life” movie.

Despite the film’s ever-increasing death toll, Green maintains an upbeat, almost playful tone throughout. By definition, nearly everyone he chronicles will have passed on before the film’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. As the introspective journey draws to a close, the filmmaker floats the idea of continuing the project into the future, even after his departure. Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing) Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.