Dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu | Biopic drama 2026
Tom Cruise goes gloriously off-piste in this apocalyptic black comedy. After spending the last decade throwing himself off mountains, out of aeroplanes and onto moving trains. In Digger, he does something arguably more dangerous: he stops being Tom Cruise.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Birdman and The Revenant, Digger is a darkly comic, extravagantly strange satire about power, ego and the human capacity to turn catastrophe into a publicity opportunity. It is also the kind of film that seems determined to wrong-foot its audience.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an immensely wealthy oil tycoon whose latest drilling venture unleashes an ecological catastrophe of potentially global proportions. Suddenly the man who helped create the disaster has appointed himself the man uniquely qualified to save humanity from it. His frantic attempt to control both the catastrophe and the story surrounding it sends the film careering between disaster movie, political satire, grotesque comedy and something considerably more surreal.
And then there is the cast, and it’s a starry piece of kit. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, the scientist whose alarming information sets the crisis in motion; Sandra Hüller is Digger’s prickly half-sister and business partner; John Goodman plays a formidable American president; Michael Stuhlbarg is his less-than-heroic vice-president; and Jesse Plemons occupies a mysterious role whose significance only becomes clear as the film progresses.
But this is unmistakably Cruise’s film. Gone is the immaculate action hero. Digger is physically altered by prosthetics and costume, giving Cruise a paunchier, stranger appearance, and the performance is deliberately oversized: swaggering, manic, needy and occasionally very funny. He seems to be enjoying the opportunity to send up the kind of enormous ego that Hollywood has spent decades constructing around him. Cruise has also revealed that the character grew out of his own collaboration with Iñárritu rather than being based on a real person.
What makes the performance particularly interesting is the collision between Cruise’s extraordinary screen charisma and Digger’s increasingly ridiculous predicament. He can still command a frame simply by walking into it, but here that star power becomes part of the joke. Digger believes he is the hero of his own epic. The film keeps asking whether anybody else believes it.
The supporting cast is no decoration. Hüller brings her trademark mixture of intelligence and abrasiveness, while Ahmed provides a more grounded counterweight to Cruise’s increasingly unhinged performance. Goodman appears to relish the film’s grotesque political humour. There is a sense throughout that Iñárritu has assembled actors who are perfectly happy to abandon realism whenever the joke demands it.
Visually, Digger is difficult to fault. Iñárritu has reunited with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and the film was shot entirely in VistaVision, giving it the scale and extraordinary detail of a genuine big-screen event. The production design by Dennis Gassner creates a world of spectacular disaster and decadent wealth, while the camera moves between intimate encounters and enormous landscapes with an almost operatic confidence.
It certainly looks impressive. This is not a small satire disguised as a blockbuster; it is a blockbuster that has somehow been infected by the sensibility of a very peculiar art film. The question is whether it is actually entertaining.
The answer is: sometimes wildly so, and sometimes deliberately difficult. The early critical response is unusually divided. Cruise’s performance is amazing and the film is visually inventive, but some may find the satire messy, excessive or simply exhausting.
That division is understandable. Iñárritu throws an extraordinary amount at the screen, and the film appears to be less interested in constructing a perfectly engineered narrative than in creating a sustained state of comic hysteria. There is an early development that radically changes how the story can be read, so it is better to go in knowing as little of the plot as possible. Even Sandra Hüller has suggested that the experience works better without knowing too much beforehand.
The result is an unusually risky studio film. It is big, expensive and packed with stars, yet it refuses to behave like a conventional Tom Cruise vehicle. There are no reassuringly heroic answers, no neat division between good guys and bad guys, and no guarantee that every joke — or indeed every idea — will land.
But that is also what makes Digger intriguing. At its best, it feels like Hollywood has briefly taken the handbrake off: a flamboyant, apocalyptic comedy about billionaires, political power, environmental disaster and the extraordinary human urge to turn even the end of the world into a personal triumph. It won’t be everybody’s idea of fun. But it certainly isn’t forgettable.
Ultimately this is a spectacularly mounted, defiantly eccentric black comedy, with Cruise giving one of his strangest and most committed performances. The story occasionally threatens to disappear beneath its own exuberance, but Digger has something increasingly rare in mainstream cinema: the nerve to be genuinely weird.
IN CINEMAS FROM 2 October 2026