A Catastrophic Comedy That Reminded Me Why I Still Go to the Cinema

Maybe every time I walk into a theatre, I’m searching for a kind of magic I once experienced there. The trouble with watching a lot of films is that the feeling gets harder to find. 

There’s a saturation that comes with the habit, a sort of professional shrug, and eventually wonder becomes rare, like a decent parking spot at the multiplex.

Digger is that feeling.

Digger is a tragic, dramatic satire and a theatrical triumph of modern cinema. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs, and the script, co-written with his Birdman collaborators Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris alongside Sabina Berman, is a genuinely groundbreaking piece of work. 

It is a farce, a tragedy and a lecture on how we got here all at once, and it never pauses to apologise for any of them.

Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, the most powerful man in the world, who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything. 

That’s the entire premise, and it is already more interesting than most films’ second acts.

Digger also recalls Terry Gilliam’s brilliant film, Brazil (1985). It isn’t a homage; it doesn’t lean on Brazil, and it doesn’t much resemble it either; side by side, they’d look like distant cousins at best. But the feeling is related: that giddy, slightly queasy sense of a satire so absurd and so tragic that it refuses to sit politely in a single genre. 

It is the right company for a film this ambitious.

Cruise, though, is the main event. This is his best work since Magnolia, and as a leading man you have to go all the way back to Born on the Fourth of July to find him this alive. 

Consider the casting for a moment: the actor most associated with sprinting toward danger and saving everybody in the nick of time plays a man whose great project is to be seen saving everybody in the nick of time. It is either a mischievous in-joke or an act of fearless self-awareness, and probably both.

He is mesmerising from the first frame to the last, vain and frantic and tragic and ridiculous, sometimes inside a single sentence. 

After years of hanging off aircraft for our entertainment, he has finally found a stunt that actually looks dangerous: making us laugh at him while he spirals.

He isn’t alone, either. The ensemble, which includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy, plays at exactly the same pitch, and nobody is allowed to coast. 

The supporting cast is giving career-best work, big and brash and gleefully over the top, which is precisely what this material demands. Anything quieter would have been drowned out. 

Everyone here seems to understand the assignment, and the assignment is to commit.

Iñárritu, making his first English-language film since The Revenant, brings a refreshing angle and perspective to the whole enterprise, with a demanding, unconventional structure, grandiose absurdity, bombast, and performances so over-the-top they should probably have their own postcode. 

On paper, that reads like a warning label. On screen, it is the point. The ridiculous and the tragic share the same bed here, and the film never lets either one feel like the guest.

Digger is a relentless stream of events, not necessarily action, but an incredibly interconnected plot driven by gripping storytelling, sharp dialogue, and narrative turns that barely give you time to breathe. 

Every time you think you understand where the film is going, it takes you somewhere else entirely. Where, exactly, is best left for the theatre to reveal, and being wrong is half the fun. 

What holds it together is control: the shifts in emotion, the sheer command of each scene, the way the film moves from laughter to heartbreak without a visible seam. Extraordinary.

It was shot entirely in VistaVision, a format with a frame big enough to hold the film’s ego, and the cinematography is stunning, with Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera moving like it has somewhere important to be. 

The production design understands that excess is a character in its own right. 

Everything looks enormous, expensive and a little bit absurd, which is exactly how power looks when it’s being honest with itself.

The satire has teeth, and it uses them. 

The film holds up a mirror to the world we’re living in: climate change, capitalist politics, and the contradictions we’ve slowly learned to accept as normal. 

The dark humour is sharp, the social commentary sharper, and neither ever winks at you; both land precisely because they’re wrapped in something so gleefully ridiculous. 

It makes you ask the questions we should probably be asking about the world right now, including the ones we’d rather avoid, and it does so while being funny enough that you almost forget you’re being cross-examined. 

The tagline promised a comedy of catastrophic proportions, and for once the marketing department undersold it.

It is an undeniably ambitious work, and the ambition is matched by the execution. 

Plenty of films reach for the sky and trip over their own shoelaces. This one reaches for the sky, gets there, and then asks what exactly you plan to do about the weather.

Is it demanding? Of course it is. 

Will it frustrate anyone who wants their apocalypse in a neat three-act package, complete with a helpful recap for latecomers? Probably.

If you’re after a quiet evening and a plot that politely explains itself, this is not that film, and it has no intention of becoming it. 

But if you want to be thrown around the room by something intellectually stimulating, thought-provoking and genuinely original, something that knows exactly what it’s doing and is thrilled to be doing it, then line up.

Digger reminded me, for a few hours, why I keep going back to the cinema. Brilliant. Massive. Engaging. 

And like Brazil before it, Digger looks destined for less of an audience than a congregation: the sort that argues about it in late-night conversations, rewatches it, and recommends it with a faintly evangelical glint in the eye. 

I can say with certainty that it will find a cult audience and will be talked about and pondered over for years to come.

The shrug never stood a chance.

Showing in cinemas from Friday, 2 October 2026.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie