REVIEW: ‘Digger’ Is Profound Art That Says Nothing (On Purpose)

Digger is confounding, frustrating, gorgeous, frustrated, grotesque, and as on the nose as a movie can be. It’s meticulously calculated to be exactly all of those things at the same time. If you think you know what Digger is about, or what it’s trying to say, you quite simply do not. Close your mouth, cover your ears, and march yourself to a movie theater to experience it for yourself before passing judgment or making a single assumption.

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is the ultimate caricature of an oil magnate. A monumental, literally earth-shattering disaster happens, and Digger is left to contend with the consequences, along with his staffer Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the president (John Goodman), and his sister, Emma (Sandra Hüller).

Every inch of Digger’s production design contributes to the elevated atmosphere.

The circumstance is over the top but not remotely unbelievable, and the response is so hysterical that, at first, it feels like the same cheap, thinly veiled Trump analogies that Hollywood has been suffering for years. John Goodman certainly has a few moments where you wonder if he was invoking a particular accent, and the religious zealotry and incompetent cabinet around him are upsettingly plausible. But the thin veil is actually a misdirect.

Digger is so much more than a movie about idiotocracy or the naked cruelty of capitalists. Whether you’re somebody who is ready to laugh because you have to or you’re somebody who can’t stand to watch our grim reality so heavy-handedly lampooned, director Alejandro Iñárritu and his coterie of writers (Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone) need you good and riled up for the entire movie to work.

Every inch of Digger’s production design contributes to this atmosphere. The sets are eerily whimsical, uncanny, and off-putting at every turn. The score is one of the strangest since Poor Things, and the sound design is utterly overwhelming. In one of the landmark scenes of the movie, set in a colosseum-like structure filled with monochrome extras, Tom Cruise not only delivers a powerhouse of a monologue, but his physical performance speaks to the movie’s excellent choreography and really accentuates the power of Digger’s sound and set design.

Digger’s profound in how it chooses to say absolutely nothing.

If you didn’t know it was Tom Cruise underneath the pounds of prosthetics and cowboy getup, you’d be forgiven. Because for almost the entirety of the movie, Cruise is lost deep within this utterly unique character in his oeuvre. But every once in a while, you catch just the tiniest, intentional glimpse of Cruise underneath all the makeup and bluster, and you’re reminded why he is an absolute superstar.

The rest of the performances keep up just fine, especially Ahmed and Goodman. But it’s Jesse Plemons who is the most essential member of the supporting cast. His every appearance feels ghastly and unsettling, and the reasons why that’s true become apparent as Digger goes on. But when he gives one massive monologue late in the film, it ties the entire movie together and lifts it from something interesting into the profound.

But Digger’s profundity isn’t derived from how sharply it criticizes any group of people or how poignant it is about how to address climate change. Digger’s profundity in how it chooses not to say anything. At least, nothing its audience doesn’t already know. We don’t need a lecture or a sharp witticism to tell us that the world is falling apart and that evil men have spent decades doing nothing to prevent it. We’re keenly aware of this—more and more so every day.

Digger is undeniably effective at making you feel some kind of uncomfortable way.

But the movie isn’t cynical, either. Or naive. It just is. It just presents things for exactly what they are and lets the audience feel however they need to about it to get by. Because sometimes, that’s simply all we can do: get by. All the ways Digger gets you mad at it, or makes you laugh along, lead to the simple reality that nothing a single person watching this movie does can make a difference in the grand scheme of what is destroying our planet.

If anything, Digger wants you to sit there and feel terrible for the ways you’ve normalized or contributed to the world’s woes. But it also wants you to forgive yourself, because what else were you supposed to do? You’re not Digger Rockwell. You’re not the president. You probably don’t even work for either of them, and if you did, what could you honestly do to start a mutiny tomorrow? Digger isn’t forgiving you, necessarily, but it understands you. And it’s excellent at taking advantage of your feelings, whatever they may be, and making you question the point of pretty much anything.

No matter what you get out of Digger or how you feel about what it does and doesn’t say about our ongoing climate catastrophe, it’s undeniably effective at making you feel some kind of uncomfortable way. Rather than trying to make a grand point about human nature or the plight of our planet like so many politically charged movies before it, Digger says more than most of them by choosing not to say anything at all. It’s a massive, uncomfortable mirror pointed at you, meant to make you question everything.

Digger is playing in theaters everywhere October 2, 2026.