The Second Oldest Man Alive

The scouts

Everyone expects the existential dread angle, the memento mori thing—but Bennett's actual obsession with *ranking* feels weirdly petty and human in a way that undercuts the whole dignity-of-age narrative, which is exactly where this thing gets interesting.

Jeremy Max executes a formally restrained portrait that sits squarely in the lineage of Errol Morris and Wiseman—the documentary-drama hybrid treated with genuine compositional rigor, where mortality isn't performed but observed across carefully measured intervals.

The decision to let Bennett's voice narrate his own competing impulses—vanity and vulnerability in the same breath—without any editorial judgment or music doing the heavy lifting is what makes the whole thing breathe; it's a sound design choice that costs nothing and changes everything.