YNOT at the Movies

Most documentary subjects sit still long enough for a film to catch up to them, but director Sam Green picked one that never does. The world's oldest living person is a title that changes hands usually every few months, sometimes even just a few days, an odd thing to build a film around on its face, but he found something bigger inside it than the novelty suggests, and spent a decade chasing it anyway. "The Oldest Person in the World" (United States 2026 | 87 min. | Documentary) turns that impossibility into its whole reason for being.

The premise is simple enough to explain in a sentence: every time the world's oldest living person dies, the title passes to someone else, and that handoff makes global news. Green latches onto the phenomenon and decides to meet each new record holder in person, starting in 2015 with Susannah Mushatt Jones, a 116-year-old Brooklyn resident known to her family as Miss Susie, who Green films alongside her 86-year-old niece. From there the film hops the globe.

In Italy, Emma Morano, 116, sings a song from her youth and offers her secret to longevity with a wink. In Jamaica, Violet Mosse-Brown, also 116, recites a poem from memory that she learned more than a century before the camera arrived. In the south of France, a nun named Sister André, 117, jokes that God "has some nerve" for keeping her alive this long. Outside Barcelona, Maria Branyas, 116 herself, holds the title while maintaining a Twitter account and shrugging the whole thing off as no big deal. The film also touches on Kane Tanaka, who held the record for nearly four years into her late 110s, and closes on the current titleholder, 117-year-old Ethel Caterham in the United Kingdom.

What keeps the film from being a curiosity reel of extreme old age is what Green threads around it. He turns the camera on his own son, Atlas, born the same year filming began, using the boy as a kind of counterweight to the supercentenarians on the other end of life. He also brings in his own health scare and the death of his younger brother, working through both in conversation with his 92-year-old mother. The structure recalls "Seven Up!" (1964), returning to subjects over years to watch time do its work on them, except here the through-line isn't a fixed group of people but whoever happens to be holding the title when Green shows up with a camera.

It's a genuinely intriguing structure for a documentary, and Green deserves credit for finding an angle into a subject that could have just been a gimmick. But watching it is harder than the premise suggests. Most of these subjects are past their 116th birthday, and it shows. Several are barely mobile, confined to wheelchairs, their bodies worn down by more than a century of living to the point that it's uncomfortable to look at for long stretches. The film doesn't shy away from that reality, but it also doesn't give you much room to look away either. It left the audience turning over a question the film never quite answers directly: what's the value of living that long if you can no longer function on your own? Longevity and quality of life aren't the same thing, and the gap between them sits at the center of nearly every scene, whether the film means to put it there or not.

The other frustration is one of omission. Green will introduce a moment, a health crisis, a family rift, a subject's death, and then move past it without following through on what actually happened. It's clearly intentional, in keeping with the film's loose, life-as-it-comes structure, but it left the audience wanting more than a few times, wishing he'd stayed in a scene a beat longer instead of cutting away.

"The Oldest Person in the World" opens in New York on Thursday, September 10, 2026, then in Bay Area and Los Angeles theaters on Friday, September 18, 2026, before expanding nationwide throughout the fall.