There are movies whose acclaim is a mystery and movies whose hatred is a mystery, and Digger belongs firmly to the second category. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's black comedy, Tom Cruise's long-telegraphed bid to be taken seriously as an actor again after two decades of being Ethan Hunt, has been met with a wave of derision that seems out of all proportion to what is actually on the screen. It is a strange film, yes, and a deliberately alienating one, the kind of swing that was never going to be for everyone. But strange is not the same as bad, and beneath the gaudy prosthetics and the tonal whiplash sits a thorny idea, one sharp enough that the film's dismissal says more about the appetite for a difficult movie than about the movie itself. Digger is good, and the reasons it is good are precisely the reasons it has been underrated.
Digger is, on its surface, the story of Digger Rockwell, a Texan oil baron whose reckless drilling triggers an environmental apocalypse, a calving ice shelf that floods Europe and cascades toward a second catastrophe. But the film is not told straight. It is staged as a play dramatizing those events in a satirical production that renders the disaster and the man behind it as broad, almost clownish spectacle, and the gap between the staged version and the reality is where the whole film lives. Tom Cruise plays Digger beneath heavy prosthetics, and Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, and Michael Stuhlbarg also star. Iñárritu directs, in his first English-language film since The Revenant.
The production design, the heightened artifice, the meticulous staginess, recall the register of something like The Phoenician Scheme, a world built to look constructed on purpose. That theatricality is not decoration; it is the argument. Iñárritu has always been drawn to the space behind the curtain, and anyone who remembers Birdman, his other film that lives backstage in a theater, will recognize the obsession here. He loves the wings, the greenroom, the machinery of performance, and Digger returns him to that territory in a more futuristic key. The staging is the point because the film is, at bottom, about staging, about the act of turning a real catastrophe into a show.
That is where the film's actual subject emerges, and it is a far more interesting one than the eco-disaster satire the marketing sold. The crux is a confrontation between Cruise, as the actor playing Digger, and the director staging the production. He has studied hours of footage of the real man, he protests, and the real Digger was nothing like this bombastic clown, he was quiet, calm, even frightening in his composure. Why render him as a buffoon? The director's answer reframes the entire film: everyone in the audience has had their life upended by this disaster, and they need to be able to laugh at the man who caused it. The caricature is not a betrayal of the truth; it is a mechanism for catharsis, a way of making an unbearable trauma survivable by making its author ridiculous. That is a genuinely rich question, who the story of a catastrophe is allowed to be told by, and what shape it has to take to be bearable, and Digger is built entirely around it.
And then the film complicates its own question in the way only Iñárritu would, by quietly revealing that the storyteller has an angle. The man staging this production of his family's guilt is not a neutral chronicler. Jesse Plemons's character turns out to be Digger's nephew, the son of Digger's sister, played by Hüller, and the staging of the family's shame doubles as something far more self-interested: an act of image rehabilitation. By controlling how the story is told, by foregrounding his family's culpability and his own willingness to confront it, he is also laundering his present, rehabilitating his own standing and that of his new company. The film lets this curdle in the background. His mother in the play, Hüller's character, is notably not rendered as a villain the way Digger is; she is poised, dignified, the founder of a green-energy offshoot called Verdant that she refuses to let anyone take from her. Sure she's a little loud, a little shrill, but she isn't nefarious. The confession, in other words, is selective, and the selection serves the living. This is pure Iñárritu, the same move that animated Birdman, a character staging a work of apparent self-exposure that is secretly a work of self-salvation.
The film threads this through its margins with real craft. There is a subplot in which Cruise's actor is desperate to locate his daughter, aboard a flight from Jamaica as a category-six hurricane closes in, and it is Plemons's character who makes it happen, deploying the resources of his private security company to find her when no government channel can. The quiet horror of the beat is what it implies: that the man telling the cautionary tale of his family's destruction is still, materially, benefiting from the empire that destruction built, still living inside the privilege it bought. The confession and the profit are not in tension for him. They coexist, comfortably, and the film is clear-eyed enough to see it.
The craft on display is the easiest thing to praise and the hardest to deny, whatever one thinks of the framing. Digger is going to be in the awards conversation for its cinematography and editing, and it will deserve to be. The standout is a long, unbroken tracking shot of Cruise delivering a soliloquy to the assembled nations of Europe, a speech about their hypocrisy, their demand that he stop drilling while they keep charging their phones and running their AI and living exactly as they do. The content of the speech is hit or miss, but the execution is extraordinary, a single sustained take that feels less like cinema than like live theater, the stage production bleeding through into the filmmaking itself. The performances within that artifice are strong across the board. Hüller is doing especially tricky work, playing an actress playing a shrill, grating version of a real woman, inhabiting the performance of a performance, and she nails every layer of it. Cruise, for his part, finally stops running long enough to act, and the quieter register he finds beneath the cartoon is the real reason to see him here.
The one real criticism, and it is a structural one, is that the play-within-the-film conceit does not bleed through visually as much as it should. For a movie whose entire meaning depends on the distinction between the staged version and the reality, the film is strangely reluctant to let you feel the staging, presumably to protect the reveal as a twist. But the better version leans in harder. Think of how a show like Kevin Can F**k Himself alternated its visual language, shooting its sitcom reality as a bright multi-camera and its true reality as a grim prestige drama, so that moving between them was its whole point. Digger needed more of that, a clearer formal line between the artifice of the production and the reality underneath, and too many of its sets feel like film sets rather than like a staged play a company could actually mount. You find yourself wondering, in practice, how these enormous set pieces would transition scene to scene on a real stage, and that is a question the film should have answered through its own form rather than left you to ask. It is a small gripe against a movie doing so much else, but it is the thing standing between a very good film and a great one.
Digger is a four out of five, a sturdy, ambitious, thoughtful film that has been treated like a folly. It asks a hard question and then has the nerve to complicate its own answer, it hands Tom Cruise the best dramatic showcase he has had in years, and it gives Iñárritu a stage, literally, for the obsessions he has been circling since Birdman. It is not for everyone, and it was never going to be. But the hatred is the real mystery here, not the film. See it, and decide for yourself who gets to tell the story.