Digger
Not everyone will get Digger. And that’s entirely the point.
This is a film I had to sit with for a bit, to distill and process what I’d seen in context with the world around us. Digger is an extraordinary, occasionally bewildering jigsaw puzzle that provides all the pieces in the end.
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, this darkly satirical examination of power, greed, responsibility and humanity’s spectacular talent for self-destruction is not particularly interested in making its audience comfortable. Nor should it be.
It’s ambitious, absurd, confronting and, beneath all its theatrical madness, oddly honest.
Can we talk about Tom Cruise?
I’ll confess something. I walked into Digger wanting to dislike him. I’ve long found Cruise’s performances rather soulless, polished to within an inch of their lives, with all the emotional spontaneity of a corporate press release. I expected more of the same.
I was so very wrong.
Here, Cruise delivers something genuinely surprising. He’s unrecognisable in more ways than one, surrendering the carefully manufactured movie-star persona in favour of something far more interesting. It’s an audacious performance that demands more than charisma, physical commitment or a willingness to run very quickly away from explosions.
There’s vulnerability beneath the absurdity, and something unexpectedly human beneath the spectacle.
This could well be the most meaningful piece of work he’s done to date. Could this be a new Tom Cruise?
Iñárritu, meanwhile, has made a film that seems almost determined to resist easy categorisation. Is it a comedy? A tragedy? A political satire? A warning? Yes. Uncomfortably, all of them but most of all it’s a good watch that is engaging, makes you think while taking creative risks.
The humour is dark, sometimes ridiculous, and frequently accompanied by the unsettling realisation that the joke might actually be on us.
The film’s exploration of corporate greed, environmental destruction and the extraordinary arrogance and disconnect of those who believe wealth and influence somehow exempt them from consequences feels painfully relevant. Yet its sharpest criticism isn’t reserved exclusively for the powerful. There’s an uncomfortable suggestion that the rest of us aren’t entirely innocent either.
After all, humanity has become remarkably good at recognising a catastrophe while simultaneously finding reasons to do absolutely nothing about it.
What makes Digger particularly fascinating is its refusal to behave like a conventional Hollywood blockbuster. It takes risks. Some ideas land more gracefully than others, and there are moments when its ambition threatens to overwhelm its message. But I’d much rather watch a filmmaker attempt something genuinely challenging than endure another two hours of expensive, focus-group-approved mediocrity. And this is where I find myself reluctant to say too much.
Because Digger is a film you can only watch once for the first time.
That first experience matters. Its unpredictability, its shifting tone and its willingness to challenge what you think you’re watching are integral to its impact. The less you know going in, the more you’ll get out of it.
I suspect audiences will be divided. Some will find it brilliant. Others will find it pretentious, frustrating or simply too strange. And that’s fine. Great cinema, like great art, doesn’t always need universal approval. Sometimes its job is to provoke an argument, a reflection, challenge an assumption or leave you staring at the credits wondering what on earth you’ve just witnessed.
For me, Digger succeeds because, despite its eccentricity (which I love), there’s something deeply sincere, almost urgent about what it’s trying to say.
It’s a film about a world that has become dangerously comfortable with its own contradictions. A world where accountability is negotiable, consequences are somebody else’s problem, and the people responsible for creating disasters are often the first to volunteer to save us from them.
Create a problem, then sell us a solution. Sound familiar?
Digger isn’t perfect. It isn’t always subtle. And it certainly isn’t for everyone.
But it’s brave, intelligent, gloriously peculiar cinema, anchored by a Tom Cruise performance I genuinely never expected to admire this much.
Above all, Digger is an oddly honest film that I sincerely hope never becomes a documentary.
