Digger (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

As he is wont to do, Alejandro G. Iñárritu graces us with an unexpected artistic tour de force this year, ushering us into awards season with panache. While the marketing for this film will have you believe it's a character study in an unconventional action flick to earn Tom Cruise accolades -- and don't misunderstand me, this performance will do just that -- this is no action movie. An icily incisive satire on capitalist governance and environmental culpability, Digger is a spiritual successor to Iñárritu's Birdman and something like a cross between a Wes Anderson comedy and a Yorgos Lanthimos film. 

Warning: it's not really possible to talk about this film without spoiling some aspect of it, so if you're worried about such things, stop reading now and go experience this amazing movie for yourself.

Digger Rockwell (the names in this screenplay are delightfully chosen) is a larger-than-life character played by Tom Cruise as a sort of Trumpian oil baron. His W. Bush-esque mannerisms allow him to act rather silly while being utterly captivating, a showman whose charisma and confidence bolstered by being the wealthiest man in any room allow him to act with impunity. We're introduced to him in his garishly opulent home, a mansion attended by servants, tending to his decrepit white cat (whose name, Maggie, and bejeweled costume invoke Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) who is clearly actively dying. Having fouled the bed she shares with Digger, she's then treated to a bath and more doting than a single living creature should ever have to endure. This opening scene feels perhaps more theatrical than it should, adding a heady mix of conversational drama to the otherwise borderline slapstick nature of its comedy.

Cruise disappears into the character, and for long stretches of the film I didn't think about his real-life persona at all. He's always been a gifted actor when allowed to do something like this -- I think of his performances in Lions for Lambs, for example, and of course Magnolia, among others -- but here he's mesmerizing. At once hilarious and disgusting, he injects moments of intimidation in interactions with other characters that make the deplorable character a bit scary. In many ways, the film is structured as a character study of him, and his arc is that of a tycoon meant to stop drilling for oil because of an impending crisis. It seems one of his rigs in the Arctic is expanding a crack in a glacier, causing an ice shelf five times the size of Washington, D.C., to crash into mainland Europe and cause catastrophic tsunamis. Millions of lives will be lost and -- more convincingly to the US cabinet -- trillions of dollars. 

In the film's second act (it's hard to know how to describe the distinct theatrical scenes in this film, as we will discuss presently), Digger is summoned to the White House, where he discusses the matter with officials. It's a room of self-serving white men (with an explicit nod to this within the dialogue) whose corrupt plans are less for the good of society than for their own benefit; instead of offering warnings to anyone, their first plan is to enact a firewall, allowing AI bots to censor and bury any keywords associated with the disaster online. The characters assembled -- including Riz Ahmed's mousy scientist and John Goodman's blowhard president with asshole cancer (literally) -- raise the energy of the film to an infectious fervor, more akin to a Coen brothers or McDonagh comedy than anything I expected here. And just when I thought things were heading in a clear and joyous direction, the film literally freezes and a tree that falls outside the White House window is revealed to be a miniature.

They're all on a stage, rehearsing a play; in the most jaw-dropping moment I've experienced in a film in years, the scene resets, with makeup artists hurrying on to touch up the actors, boom mics dropping into view, the scrim at back getting readjusted to better show the landscape projection of miniatures to create a lifelike backdrop. It's a Brechtian shift that I will not soon recover from. The director (Sophie Wilde of Talk to Me) enters to give notes to her stars during this, their final dress rehearsal. The play -- cleverly titled Fossil Fools -- is apparently a big-budget revival of the play on its 25th anniversary, meant as a satire on a real-life disaster that has since changed the world. Cruise, now revealed as actor Curtis playing Digger in the play, has a bizarre subplot of trying to locate his daughter flying on a plane through a hurricane, which indicates the real-life stakes of the "comedy" he's depicting on stage. How can we laugh at such existential horrors? Why are we simply making fun of the men responsible for the willful destruction of our world?

That largely seems the point of this film: how can and will art move forward and address things like the rise of fascism and late-stage capitalist corruption of Western society when (and if) we survive our current moment? The play is being produced by a mysterious young man (Jesse Plemons) who keeps floating around the stage and dressing rooms -- Digger's story is broken up by a few such interruptions of the "behind the scenes" resets that allow for jumps in time and location but not for any rest in the drama and comedy of this film -- eventually revealed as the real-life Digger Rockwell's nephew, who earnestly believes and expresses in his climactic speech to the cast and crew of Fossil Fools that people need a way to respond to tragedies and horrors of our past and that perhaps satire and theatre are a perfect means. It's a surprisingly uplifting moment (a la Charlie Kaufman in, for example, Synecdoche, New York) that inspires the production to push forward, even when (as the denouement reveals), the audience will need gas masks before they can go out onto the post-apocalyptic street after the bows.

This humanistic valorization of art is unexpected but sorely needed after the film's middle act -- its Shakespearean climax -- in which Digger addresses a sort of model Parliament/UN body of assembled heads of state. In a scene deserving of much screen time during awards ceremonies, Cruise as Curtis as Digger enters a room of powerful people knowing full well he is the most powerful among them. Fanned to an explosive fury by prior testimony about Digger's guilt and brazen disregard for the common good, they're prepared to effectively tar and feather him; their grayscale monochrome fury has the effect of seeming a Greek chorus. He's Mark Antony, about to paint himself as a hero and turn the crowd against Brutus again. He's Coriolanus, entering the court of public opinion and about to hand their asses to them on a spike. He delivers what must have been a ten-minute speech basically implicating the world (and us by extension) in his evil; we're too satisfied with living our unsustainable lives, he says, to do anything more than point fingers at him, the man actually doing something to make our lifestyle possible. It's damning, and truly hard to sit through.

And that's true for much of the film. I want to rewatch it with subtitles, because often the characters are shouting their lines over each other, desperate to be heard yet rarely with anything meaningful to say. These vapid, selfish monsters controlling our fate are ridiculous, and we are meant to laugh at their follies even as we recognize their clear parallels in our own world. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (a personal favorite) returns to work with Iñárritu with his typically brilliant work, shifting our focus from the gray malaise of the play-within-the-play to a marginally more colorful one in the theater, itself protected chromatically from the world beyond. Cosmo Sheldrake's score matches the timbre of the cast, often droning with deafening flourishes that feel operatic in small doses, like a sort of classical, sonic Tourette's. There's also a dose of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove here, both in comedic tone and meticulous approach to production design and uncanny surrealism. Digger won't be to everyone's taste, especially not those excited by the frankly misdirecting marketing, but if you're willing to get on its verbose and semi-surreal wavelength, it's a brilliant and haunting work of masterful filmmaking.

I dig it.