Is Digger Worth Watching? Everything to Know About Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Divisive 2026 Satire

What is Digger about?

The official logline is short and slightly unhinged, which feels appropriate. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, "the most powerful man in the world," who "embarks on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity's savior before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything." Warner Bros. has been selling it with the tagline "a comedy of catastrophic proportions," and that phrase does a lot of honest work. This is a disaster movie in which the disaster is also the joke, and the man at the centre of it is both the cause and, in his own mind, the cure.

Filling in the gaps from what has been reported, Digger is a Texan oil tycoon whose drilling operation triggers an environmental catastrophe. Rather than retreat into shame or lawyers, he decides that fate has summoned him personally to fix it, and sets off on what one early test-screening report described as an absurd global mission that brings him face to face with world leaders. Among them is John Goodman's President Compson, described on the film's Wikipedia page as a dictatorial U.S. President, with Michael Stuhlbarg as his Vice President and Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, a scientist who also serves as the President's assistant. Sandra Hüller plays Emma Rockwell, Digger's sister, which already tells you the film intends to put a family inside all the geopolitics.

Cruise himself has framed the story in plain terms. Talking to Good Morning America, he said, "This is a story about power, greed, about responsible and being irresponsible," and described Digger as a man who is "trying to control things that are just... you can't control it." That second line is the one I keep circling back to, because it is also, in a way, a description of Tom Cruise's entire public image. More on that later.

Tonally, nearly every early description reaches for the same reference point: Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. /Film framed the premise as a satire evoking Kubrick's Cold War farce, and the March test-screening chatter reported by World of Reel described it as a Strangelove-style dark comedy rebuilt for the present day. Several first reactions also note that the film does not stay in one register. The Playlist's round-up of reactions summarised a shift from over-the-top comedy into something much more somber, and Matt Neglia wrote that the film "suddenly turns into a meta, somber commentary on the bleak state of the world." So the honest answer to "what is Digger about?" is that it is about a powerful man and a catastrophe, but its real subject appears to be how absurd, and then how frightening, that combination becomes.

Who is Digger Rockwell, and why does Tom Cruise look unrecognizable?

If you have seen the trailer, you have seen the first thing everyone talks about: Tom Cruise does not look like Tom Cruise. Digger Rockwell is built from prosthetics, aging makeup and, according to the World of Reel test-screening report, a thick Southern accent. For an actor whose face has been one of the most recognisable brands in cinema for four decades, burying it is a statement.

The transformation came with a practical problem that is very on brand for Cruise. Speaking on the New Heights podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce, he explained that the prosthetic application initially took six hours. Combined with twelve-hour shooting days and the need to sleep at some point, that was unworkable. So he set about optimising it like a stunt. "I had a guy there with a stopwatch and I'm like, 'OK, you see that time, six hours? By the time we're done, we're going to get it under an hour,'" he said, adding that the team's first response was, "No, I'm not doing that, it will never happen." They got it under an hour by timing each piece and drilling the process repeatedly.

I find that story more revealing than any trailer. Cruise has spent the last fifteen years making the physical act of filmmaking part of the product: the Burj Khalifa climb, the motorbike off a cliff, the real fighter jets. Digger asks him to put that same obsessive discipline into disappearing rather than dazzling. At the London premiere, speaking to GQ as reported by ABC News, he called the role "the culmination of all my skills. I've never done it before," and described Digger as "the most challenging character ever." Iñárritu, for his part, described Cruise's work as demonstrating "another kind of fearless," a line quoted on the film's Wikipedia page from Variety's coverage. That phrase is a neat summary of the whole project's pitch: the fearlessness here is not about hanging off a plane, it is about risking looking ridiculous.

Who's in the cast of Digger?

The ensemble is one of the strongest arguments for the film on paper. Iñárritu has assembled a mix of prestige character actors, European arthouse royalty and younger talent that looks, frankly, like a festival jury's dream table.

Main cast and roles (as reported): - Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, the oil tycoon - Sandra Hüller as Emma Rockwell, Digger's sister - Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, a scientist and the President's assistant - John Goodman as President Compson - Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President - Jesse Plemons - Emma D'Arcy - Sophie Wilde - Burn Gorman - Robert John Burke - Pip Torrens - Mercedes Hernández as Digger's housekeeper - Danny Kirrane as Sandy Clarkson

Roles for Plemons, D'Arcy, Wilde, Gorman, Burke and Torrens have not been publicly detailed, and I would rather tell you that than guess.

Sandra Hüller is the name that made cinephiles sit up. She had one of the great years any actor has had in recent memory in 2023, leading Justine Triet's Palme d'Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, which earned her an Academy Award nomination and a César for Best Actress, and co-starring as Hedwig Höss in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest. Before that she was the brittle, brilliant centre of Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann, a comedy about a daughter and an absurdist father, which feels like a relevant credential for a film about a sister and an absurdist brother. She also won a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 2026 Berlinale for Rose. Casting her as Digger's sister suggests the film wants someone in the Rockwell family who can see through him.

Riz Ahmed is emerging as the ensemble's most consistently praised performer. The Playlist's round-up said he was repeatedly singled out as "a highlight," NME noted he received consistent praise across reactions, and Polygon's Jacob Kleinman went furthest, writing, "Cruise is great, but he's the least interesting actor onscreen," while highlighting the ensemble and Ahmed in particular. Ahmed earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Sound of Metal, won an Emmy for HBO's The Night Of, and won an Oscar for the live-action short The Long Goodbye. He is very good at playing the smartest, most exhausted person in the room, and a scientist attached to a chaotic presidency sounds exactly like that.

John Goodman as the President is perfect casting for satire. His filmography includes six Coen brothers films (Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis among them), the voice of Sulley in Monsters, Inc., the long run as Dan Conner on Roseanne, and the unusual distinction of appearing in back-to-back Best Picture winners, The Artist and Argo. Goodman can be jovial and terrifying in the same breath, and Variety's Clayton Davis singled out his work alongside Cruise's as a strength. Production trivia: filming paused for two days in March 2025 after Goodman sustained a minor hip injury.

Michael Stuhlbarg is the actor you recognise from everything: the lead in the Coens' A Serious Man, the father who delivers the famous monologue in Call Me by Your Name, Dr. Hoffstetler in The Shape of Water, Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire and Richard Sackler in Dopesick. He is a master of quiet unease, which is a useful thing to put next to a loud President.

Jesse Plemons won Best Actor at Cannes for Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness, earned an Oscar nomination for The Power of the Dog, and was widely praised for Bugonia in 2025. His work with Lanthimos is the relevant reference here: he is comfortable inside deadpan, surreal worlds that refuse to explain themselves.

Emma D'Arcy is best known as Rhaenyra Targaryen in HBO's House of the Dragon, a role that brought two Golden Globe nominations. Sophie Wilde broke out in the Australian horror hit Talk to Me, winning the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress, and was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. The Playlist's summary noted Wilde was among the supporting players reactions praised, alongside Goodman.

What strikes me about this roster is how few of these actors are "movie star" casting in the Cruise sense. It is a character-actor ensemble built around a movie star who is, for once, pretending to be a character actor. That tension is the film's whole design.

Who made Digger? The creative team behind the film

Digger reunites much of the team that won Iñárritu his biggest prizes, which is one reason the ambitions feel so high.

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Digger is his first English-language feature since The Revenant in 2015.

Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman. Dinelaris and Giacobone co-wrote Birdman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Giacobone also worked with Iñárritu on Biutiful and The Revenant. Berman is one of Mexico's most decorated writers: a novelist (Me, Darwin's God), playwright, journalist and screenwriter, and a four-time winner of Mexico's National Playwriting Award.

Story by: Sabina Berman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth. Butterworth is the English playwright behind Jerusalem and The Ferryman, the latter of which won both the Olivier and the Tony for Best Play. He is also a Cruise collaborator of sorts, having written for Edge of Tomorrow, which makes his involvement a nice thread between director and star.

Producers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Tom Cruise, Mary Parent and Michael Sharp. Production companies are Legendary Pictures, TC Productions and M Productions, with Warner Bros. Pictures distributing.

Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, the first cinematographer to win three consecutive Oscars, for Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant. He is famous for natural light and long, fluid, uninterrupted camera movement, and his collaborators include Alfonso Cuarón and Terrence Malick. Digger was shot on 35mm film in VistaVision using Leitz Cine ELSIE lenses, and it is being released in IMAX.

Music: Cosmo Sheldrake, making his feature film debut. This is my favourite left-field choice on the whole project. Sheldrake is an English musician and composer whose work is built around improvisation, nonsense and environmental sound. He plays everything from double bass to sousaphone, released the albums The Much Much How How and I, Wake Up Calls and Eye to the Ear, and wrote a song imagining life as a tardigrade. You can hear the logic immediately: a film about an ecological catastrophe scored by someone who makes music out of the natural world. It echoes the gamble Iñárritu took on Birdman, where drummer Antonio Sánchez built an almost entirely percussion score.

Editing: Stephen Mirrione and Conor O'Neill. Mirrione co-edited Birdman with Douglas Crise, the film that had to be stitched together to look like one continuous shot.

Visual effects: Industrial Light & Magic and Legacy Effects.

The idea itself has a long history. According to the film's Wikipedia page, Iñárritu conceived it after The Revenant, and he began talking to Cruise in 2019 while Cruise was making Top Gun: Maverick. Cruise told Good Morning America that he first met Iñárritu about the project on the same day filming began on Maverick. The film was officially announced in February 2024, after Cruise's strategic partnership with Warner Bros. was announced in January of that year, and it is the first project under that deal. It is also Cruise's first film with the studio since Edge of Tomorrow.

Principal photography ran at Pinewood Studios in the UK from November 7, 2024, wrapping on May 3, 2025, under the working title "Judy." The title Digger was announced on December 18, 2025. Wikipedia lists the budget at $125 million and the countries of origin as the United States, the United Kingdom and Mexico. Screen Daily reported that the filmmakers called the UK premiere meaningful because "Digger was filmed, and post-production completed, in the UK."

When does Digger come out, and where can I watch it?

Digger opens in cinemas on Friday, October 2, 2026, in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Warner Bros. is distributing, and the film is being released in IMAX. The reported runtime sits at around 128 minutes, a little over two hours, though I have seen it listed as high as 129 minutes in some official listings, so treat it as approximate until you check your local showtime.

Right now, the only way to see Digger is in a cinema. There is no announced streaming or digital release date, so anyone telling you where to stream it is guessing. I will update this piece if Warner Bros. confirms a home release.

The marketing has been unusually patient. Cruise and Iñárritu presented footage at CinemaCon on April 14, 2026, and The Hollywood Reporter called it among the best footage shown at that year's convention. A 30-second clip followed on May 13, 2026, attached to Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick re-releases, then an official trailer on June 23 and a full trailer on July 13.

If you are deciding on format, I would lean toward IMAX or at least a large premium screen. This is a Lubezki film shot on VistaVision, and the one thing even the harshest first reactions concede is that it looks extraordinary. Joey Magidson, who disliked the film, still acknowledged its "great production design," and test-screening viewers compared its visual style to Poor Things.

Why is Digger trending right now?

Two things landed at almost the same moment. First, the world premiere. Digger was chosen as the Royal Film Performance, held on September 22, 2026, at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square in London in support of the Film and TV Charity. According to Screen Daily, it was the 73rd such screening in the charity's 100-year history. Prince William, who is president of BAFTA, and the Princess of Wales attended, as did David Beckham with his sons Romeo and Cruz, alongside Cruise, Iñárritu and cast members including Hüller, Goodman, Stuhlbarg, Ahmed, Plemons, Wilde and D'Arcy. A royal gala is exactly the kind of event that pushes a film into general-interest news in the UK.

Second, the embargo on social reactions lifted after press screenings in New York and Los Angeles, and they were not the usual wall of superlatives. Headlines told the story. IndieWire went with "Audacious," "Hollow Misfire," and "Massive Swing" alongside claims of Cruise's "Best Performance" in years. Variety's read: "Tom Cruise Baffles in Divisive Comedy." The Hollywood Reporter quoted one reaction calling it a "Brave Gorgeous Misfire." When a Tom Cruise movie earns the words "baffling" and "masterpiece" on the same afternoon, people want to know why.

What are critics saying about Digger?

A quick caveat before the quotes: these are first reactions, mostly short social posts written straight after screenings, not full reviews. Full reviews tend to be more measured in both directions. There is no Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score yet, and I am not going to invent one.

The case for Digger

The most enthusiastic reaction came from Jim Hemphill, who wrote that the film "not only showcases Tom Cruise's best performance since Magnolia, it's one of the most visually inventive, conceptually audacious, and unpredictable studio movies ever made." That is an enormous claim, and the Magnolia comparison is significant: Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film earned Cruise an Oscar nomination and is widely seen as his greatest dramatic work.

Courtney Howard called it "powder keg cinema," praising "a brilliant, boldly invigorated, tour de force performance" from Cruise and describing the film as "a masterfully compelling, electric & audaciously assured satirical farce." Mark Daniell called it "Tom Cruise's bravest and riskiest performance in over 20 years." Drew Taylor described "a grand satire (or farce?) about our current predicament" that is "odd and extraordinary." Jake Hamilton of Good Day Chicago called it his favourite film of 2026 and said the performance ranks among Cruise's career best. Jeff Ewing called it "an ambitious, often surreal tour de force" with a "timely, rare undercurrent of anger in its satire," while admitting it "doesn't always land."

Anne Thompson of IndieWire landed in an interesting middle position that is really a prediction: "a brave and gorgeous art film that will not score with mainstream audiences but will play best for the Academy."

The case against Digger

Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture was the sharpest detractor. He acknowledged Cruise's "most dynamic role in years" but found the film "so imbalanced in favor of zany but empty theatrics" that it lacked "enough depth or humanity," calling it "bizarre, self-admittedly unfunny" and concluding it was "less of a bang and more of a hollow misfire."

Joey Magidson of Awards Radar wrote that "Digger is a mess" and "not a whole lot works here," conceding "Cruise is good" but saying "this wasn't enjoyable." Mike Ryan said Cruise "is going for it" but found some of the choices "baffling" and the film "kind of generally unpleasant," noting that its meta moments about Cruise's career were done better in Maverick. Edward Douglas wrote, "I cannot say that Digger is very good," and predicted a weak CinemaScore, the letter grade opening-night audiences give a film.

The middle ground

Clayton Davis of Variety respected the ambition and praised Cruise, Goodman and the craft, but felt "not all the dots connect" and wished the film had "leaned harder into the absurdity and satire." His summary may be the most useful sentence anyone has written about Digger so far: "the divide on this one is going to be wide." Kristen Lopez called it "a very mixed bag" with an interesting concept that "doesn't trust the audience enough not to hold its hand." Jonathan Sim felt the stakes were "much lower than they should" be, observing, "Everything's cranked up to an 11." And Bill Bria of /Film called it "one of the most abrasive" studio movies in memory, "subversively angry," but said "Cruise's performance sees it through."

One reaction, from a poster going by Comrade Perez, captured the mood in a single line: "It will easily be the most polarizing film of the year."

Why are critics so divided on Digger?

Reading these reactions side by side, the split is not really about whether Digger is well made. Almost nobody disputes the craft. Even the negative voices mention production design, Cruise's commitment, or Goodman's work. The split is about three questions of taste and tolerance.

The first is tone. Digger appears to start as an over-the-top farce and then pivot into something much darker and more reflective. If that pivot works for you, it is the moment the film earns its size. If it does not, it feels like the movie lost its nerve, or its sense of humour, halfway through. Neglia's line about the film turning into "a meta, somber commentary on the bleak state of the world" is a criticism from him, but I can easily imagine another critic writing the same sentence as praise.

The second is abrasiveness. Bill Bria, who liked it, and Mike Ryan, who did not, are describing the same quality: a film that is loud, confrontational and not especially interested in being pleasant. "Abrasive" and "unpleasant" are two words for the same experience, filtered through whether you enjoyed the ride. Satire that comes out swinging will always lose some of the audience it is swinging at.

The third is how you feel about satire right now. The Playlist's round-up noted that some critics felt the satire struggled given how absurd reality already is. That is an old problem for comedy about power, and it cuts both ways. Drew Taylor called it a satire "about our current predicament" and found that thrilling. Others feel that exaggerating the world is harder when the world keeps exaggerating itself.

There is a fourth, quieter factor: expectation. This is Tom Cruise's first film after closing out Mission: Impossible. Anyone walking in wanting the Cruise of Maverick or The Final Reckoning is going to be startled. Mike Ryan's comment that Maverick did the meta-career material better suggests the film is, at least partly, a commentary on Cruise's own persona, and that will land very differently depending on how much you enjoy seeing that persona prodded.

Is Digger really Tom Cruise's best performance in years?

This is the question driving most of the searches, so let me take it seriously. What is notable is that even Digger's critics mostly agree Cruise is the reason to watch. Neglia called it his "most dynamic role in years." Magidson said "Cruise is good." Bria said the performance "sees it through." Davis praised it. The disagreement is less "is Cruise good?" and more "is Cruise enough?"

To understand why "best performance since Magnolia" is such a pointed comparison, you have to remember the other Tom Cruise. Alongside the action franchise, there has always been a strand of his career in which he plays against his own charisma. In Born on the Fourth of July he played paralysed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic and earned his first Best Actor nomination. In Magnolia he played Frank T.J. Mackey, a toxic self-help guru, and earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination. In Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut he let himself look lost and humiliated. In Michael Mann's Collateral he played a grey-haired contract killer. In Tropic Thunder he became Les Grossman, a foul-mouthed studio executive buried under makeup, in a cameo that earned him a Golden Globe nomination and still gets quoted today. In Rock of Ages he played burnt-out rock star Stacee Jaxx.

Digger looks like the most extreme version of that strand yet: not a cameo in a fat suit, not a supporting turn, but a full leading role in which the face, the voice and the body are all rebuilt. It is also, notably, another man who believes he alone can save everyone, which is the premise of about half of Cruise's filmography played straight. Whether he has topped Mackey I cannot tell you until I see it. But the fact that critics who hated the film are still reaching for words like "dynamic" and "going for it" tells me the performance is, at minimum, a genuine event.

What is Alejandro G. Iñárritu's track record?

Iñárritu is one of the most decorated directors working, and also one of the most divisive, which is why Digger's reception feels less like a surprise and more like a pattern.

He arrived internationally with Amores perros (2000), a Mexico City triptych connected by a single car crash, co-written with Guillermo Arriaga. The two continued that interlocking, fractured-timeline approach with 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), the latter winning him Best Director at Cannes, making him the first Mexican-born director to do so. Biutiful (2010) was a stripped-back, intimate drama that marked his split from the Arriaga style and began his collaboration with Nicolás Giacobone.

Then came the two-year run that put him in the history books. Birdman (2014), a satirical black comedy starring Michael Keaton as a faded superhero actor staging a Broadway comeback, was presented as one continuous shot, opened the Venice Film Festival, and won four Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. The Revenant (2015) won three more, for Best Director, Best Cinematography and Leonardo DiCaprio's Best Actor. That made Iñárritu only the third filmmaker to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars, after John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

In 2017 he received a Special Achievement Academy Award for Carne y Arena, a virtual reality installation about the experience of migrants crossing the border, which premiered at Cannes. In 2019 he served as jury president at Cannes.

His most recent feature before Digger was Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022), a sprawling, autobiographical Spanish-language film that premiered at Venice and went to Netflix. It polarised critics. The Guardian's Wendy Ide called it "occasionally brilliant" but "cluttered with symbolism and bloated with self-regard." It earned one Oscar nomination, for cinematography.

So when you see Digger's reactions split between "audacious" and "hollow," recognise the shape. Iñárritu's films have always been maximal, formally aggressive and emotionally loud, and there has always been a camp that finds that approach exhilarating and a camp that finds it self-important. Birdman was the rare case where nearly everyone agreed. Digger sounds more like Bardo's reception with a movie star in the middle.

Why is Digger a genre turn for Iñárritu?

At first glance, Digger might seem like a return to Birdman: another satirical black comedy about a man and his ego. But I think it is a genuine departure in three ways.

First, scale of satire. Birdman satirised a very specific, very personal world: actors, theatre, critics, superhero franchises. It was comedy about art made by people who make art. Digger aims its satire outward at power, money and ecological catastrophe on a global stage. That is a much larger and riskier target, and the Strangelove comparisons show what it is up against.

Second, the disaster genre. Iñárritu has made intimate dramas, a survival epic and a backstage comedy, but never anything resembling a disaster movie. Digger borrows the architecture of the disaster film, the ticking clock and the world in peril, and plays it for absurdity. It is a genre mashup he has not attempted before.

Third, a movie star at the centre. Keaton in Birdman and DiCaprio in The Revenant were famous, but neither film was built around a persona as loaded as Tom Cruise's. Digger is a Cruise vehicle in the sense that it is about Cruise's image as much as it uses his talent. For a director whose work has often been read as autobiographical, especially Bardo, collaborating on something so outward-facing and star-driven is new territory.

For Cruise, the genre turn is even starker. His last decade has been almost entirely large-scale action: the Mission: Impossible films through The Final Reckoning in 2025, Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, which grossed over a billion dollars. His most memorable comedic work, like Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, has come in supporting roles and cameos. Digger is a leading role in an absurdist satire, directed by an arthouse auteur, with no stunts as the selling point. It is the first film of his Warner Bros. partnership, and he chose to open that chapter with the least commercial-looking movie he has made in years.

How does Digger fit into Tom Cruise's career right now?

Timing matters here. In November 2025, Cruise received an honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards, recognising a 45-year career, his contribution to cinema and his support for the theatrical experience. The award was presented on stage by Alejandro G. Iñárritu himself. He had never won a competitive Oscar despite four nominations: Best Actor for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, Supporting Actor for Magnolia, and as a producer when Top Gun: Maverick was nominated for Best Picture.

An honorary Oscar can feel like a full stop. Digger reads like Cruise deliberately turning it into a comma. Having wrapped up Ethan Hunt, and having been celebrated for keeping audiences in cinemas, he has gone straight into a project that is, by nearly every account, strange, abrasive and built for critics and awards voters as much as for the Friday-night crowd. Variety has already published a piece asking whether Digger could get him to a competitive Oscar, and Thompson's reaction that it "will play best for the Academy" points the same way. The Playlist's summary also noted reactions suggesting it could resonate with the Academy, especially its crafts and acting branches.

There is also a longer pattern. Cruise's most admired performances have tended to come when he partnered with directors who have strong personal styles: Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese. Iñárritu belongs on that list in reputation. The difference is that Cruise now arrives with far more power than he had in those earlier collaborations, including a producer credit on this one. Whether that power helped or hurt the film is a fair question, and one I will be watching for.

How does Digger compare to Dr. Strangelove, Birdman and other satires?

The Strangelove comparison is unavoidable, and it is a heavy crown. Kubrick's film worked partly because it was controlled: it played everything straight-faced while the world ended around a table of men. Early word on Digger suggests the opposite approach. Jonathan Sim's line that "everything's cranked up to an 11" and the test-screening remark that Cruise's antics were "bordering on cartoonish" suggest Iñárritu has gone louder, not drier. That is a legitimate choice, but it means the film is really closer to farce than to Kubrick's deadpan.

Against Birdman, the key difference is warmth. Birdman was savage, but it loved its broken hero and the theatre he was trying to save. From what critics describe, Digger is angrier. Bria's "subversively angry" and Ewing's "rare undercurrent of anger" point to a film that is not trying to redeem its central figure so much as expose him.

The Poor Things comparison, which came up for visual style in test screenings, is useful in a different way. Yorgos Lanthimos's film proved that audiences will turn up for heightened, strange, gorgeously designed studio-backed films, as long as there is a strong central performance to hold on to. Digger has that performance, and it has Jesse Plemons, a Lanthimos regular, in the cast.

It is also hard not to think of Adam McKay's Don't Look Up, another star-led satire about global catastrophe and the people in power who mishandle it. My guess, and it is only a guess from the reactions, is that Digger is the more formally ambitious of the two and the more uncomfortable.

What should I know before buying a ticket?

A few practical notes, all based on what has been reported so far:

It is a comedy, but not an easy one. Expect absurdism, not jokes in the sitcom sense. Neglia's "self-admittedly unfunny" suggests the film at times seems to be aware of its own jokes falling flat, which is either clever or maddening depending on who you ask.

The tone shifts. Several reactions describe a turn from comedy into something somber in the later stretch. If you go in expecting a romp for the whole running time, that shift may feel like whiplash.

It is not an action movie. There is no reason to expect Mission: Impossible-style set pieces. The spectacle here is visual design, camera work and Cruise's transformation.

See it big if you see it. Shot on 35mm VistaVision by one of the great living cinematographers and released in IMAX, this is the kind of film where the format is part of the experience.

Watch the ensemble. Multiple reactions suggest the supporting cast, Riz Ahmed above all, may be as rewarding as the lead.

Content: No official age rating details were in the sources I reviewed, so check your local listings, particularly if you are thinking of taking teenagers.

Who should watch Digger?

You should see Digger if you are a fan of Iñárritu's bigger swings. If Birdman is one of your favourite films and you found even the messier Bardo fascinating, Digger is squarely for you. The same goes for anyone who loved The Revenant's visual scale and wants to see what Lubezki does with a completely different genre.

You should see it if you are a Cruise completist or a Cruise sceptic. That sounds contradictory, but it is not. Fans get to see him attempt something he has never done. Sceptics who find his action persona a little too polished get to see him dismantle it. Either way, this is likely to be one of the most discussed performances of his career.

You should see it if you love divisive films and like forming your own opinion. Some of the most rewarding cinema of any year is the stuff that splits a room. If you enjoy walking out of a theatre and arguing about what you just saw, Digger seems designed for exactly that conversation.

You should see it if you are following the awards season. Between Thompson's Academy prediction, Variety's Oscar-chances coverage and the craft pedigree, Digger will be part of the conversation for months whether it wins anything or not.

And you should see it if you enjoy heightened, stylised satire in the vein of Poor Things, Dr. Strangelove or Lanthimos's work more broadly. The Plemons casting alone suggests an appetite for that register.

Who should skip Digger?

You might want to skip it, or at least wait for home release, if you are looking for a fun, easy night out. Several reactions, including from critics who admired the ambition, flag the film as unpleasant, abrasive or overstuffed. That is not a comfortable popcorn movie.

Skip it if you mainly love Cruise for action. There is no evidence this is the film you want. Maverick and the Mission: Impossible films are right there.

Skip it if tonal whiplash frustrates you. If you want a film to pick a lane, early word suggests Digger pointedly does not.

Skip it if overt satire about power and catastrophe is the last thing you want right now. Some people go to the movies to escape the news; this one, by most accounts, holds up a warped mirror to it.

And if you are someone who disliked Bardo for being indulgent, pay close attention to reactions like Neglia's and Magidson's. Their complaints about "zany but empty theatrics" and a film that "wasn't enjoyable" sound like the same objections Bardo's detractors raised.

My honest take on Digger

I have not seen Digger, and I want to be upfront about that. Everything here is built on the trailer, the premise, the people involved and a careful reading of the first reactions. But I have been following this project since it was just "Tom Cruise and Iñárritu, untitled," and I have a clear view on it.

Here is where I land: I think Digger is going to be a better film than its detractors are saying, and a less complete one than its champions are claiming. And I think that is exactly what makes it worth seeing in a cinema.

Start with the thing nobody seems to be arguing about. Every single reaction I read, positive or negative, treats Cruise's performance as serious and committed. That is not a small thing. The worst-case scenario for a movie star in heavy prosthetics is that it plays as a stunt, a costume the actor is visibly wearing. The worst reactions to Digger are not saying that. They are saying the film around him is too loud, too scattered, too pleased with itself. Those are problems of direction and script, not performance. The stopwatch story tells you how seriously he took the craft of becoming this person, and I trust that kind of obsession more than I trust a trailer.

Where I part company with the consensus is on the tonal shift. Most reactions treat the swing from farce into somber commentary as a flaw, a sign that the film does not know what it wants to be. I suspect it is the point. Iñárritu has always been drawn to the moment when spectacle cracks and something raw shows through underneath. Birdman does it in its final act. The Revenant does it every time it cuts from brutal survival to dreamlike memory. A film about a man who causes a catastrophe and then tries to turn it into his own hero story almost has to end by taking the catastrophe seriously. If it stayed a romp to the credits, it would be letting Digger off the hook. I would rather a satire that stops laughing than one that never finds the courage to.

That said, I take Kristen Lopez's criticism seriously, because it matches the weakness I have noticed in Iñárritu's work before. Saying a film "doesn't trust the audience enough not to hold its hand" is a very specific complaint, and it is the same one I had about Bardo, where the symbolism is so emphatic you can feel the director tapping your shoulder. Iñárritu at his best, in Amores perros or Birdman, trusts you to connect the dots. At his most indulgent, he connects them for you in thick marker. Clayton Davis's "not all the dots connect" and Lopez's hand-holding complaint, read together, suggest Digger may somehow do both at once: over-explain some ideas while leaving others dangling. That is my biggest reservation.

I also think Riz Ahmed may quietly walk away with this film. Kleinman's claim that Cruise is "the least interesting actor onscreen" is deliberately provocative, but when multiple reactions keep circling back to Ahmed, pay attention. Satire often needs a straight man, the one sane person reacting to madness, and Ahmed has built a career on playing intelligence under pressure. If Digger works, I would bet it works partly because his character gives the audience somewhere to stand.

On the music, I am genuinely excited. Hiring Cosmo Sheldrake, whose entire artistic identity is built on the sounds of the natural world, to score a film about a man destroying it is the kind of idea that either becomes a cult-favourite soundtrack or a fascinating misfire. Given that Antonio Sánchez's drum score became one of Birdman's signatures, I lean toward the former.

What about the awards talk? I am more sceptical than Anne Thompson. Divisive films can win big, but usually when the division is between critics and audiences, not within the critics themselves. I think Cruise has a real shot at a Best Actor nomination if the performance holds up, because the narrative is irresistible: an honorary Oscar winner reinventing himself immediately afterwards. The craft categories feel likely too, given Lubezki, the prosthetics and the production design. Best Picture feels like a much taller order based on what I have read.

Finally, the bigger picture. We complain constantly that studios only make sequels and franchises. Here is a $125 million original satire from an auteur with an unpredictable score, a character-actor ensemble and the biggest movie star in the world hiding under latex. Whatever Digger turns out to be, it is the kind of film that only gets made when someone with Cruise's clout spends it on a risk. I would rather see a flawed, audacious film like this than a smooth, forgettable one, and I think a lot of people who read the negative reactions and decide to skip it will end up catching it later and wondering why they did.

My recommendation: if any part of this piece made you curious, see it in a cinema, preferably IMAX, and go in expecting to be challenged rather than entertained in the easy sense. If nothing here appealed to you, you are not missing the film you were hoping for, and that is fine too.

Frequently asked questions

When does Digger come out? Digger opens in cinemas on October 2, 2026, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, including IMAX screens.

Is Digger streaming anywhere? No. It is a theatrical release from Warner Bros., and no streaming or digital release date has been announced yet.

What is Digger about? Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon called "the most powerful man in the world," who races to prove he is humanity's saviour before an ecological disaster he caused destroys everything. It is a satirical black comedy.

Who directed Digger? Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant. It is his first English-language film since The Revenant.

Who is in the cast of Digger? Tom Cruise, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Emma D'Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Burn Gorman, Robert John Burke, Pip Torrens, Mercedes Hernández and Danny Kirrane.

Is Digger a comedy? Yes, it is billed as "a comedy of catastrophic proportions," but reactions describe it shifting into something much darker and more somber, so do not expect a light comedy.

Why do critics disagree about Digger? Most agree on the craft and on Cruise's commitment. They split over the tone shifts, the film's abrasive energy and whether its satire lands, with some calling it "audacious" and others a "hollow misfire."

Is Digger Tom Cruise's best performance? Some critics think so. Jim Hemphill called it his "best performance since Magnolia," and Mark Daniell called it his "bravest and riskiest performance in over 20 years." Even negative reactions generally praise his work.

How long is Digger? The reported runtime is around 128 minutes, though it has also been listed as 129 minutes in some official sources.

Where did Digger premiere? It had its world premiere as the Royal Film Performance at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square in London on September 22, 2026, in support of the Film and TV Charity.

Is Digger worth watching? If you enjoy ambitious, divisive auteur films and want to see Cruise try something completely new, yes, ideally on a big screen. If you want an easy crowd-pleaser or an action movie, it may not be for you.

Not sure Digger fits your mood tonight?

Take our mood based quiz at https://www.suggestionlabs.com/quiz/movies and let us do the deciding for you.