Digger (2026)

Tom Cruise has spent most of his career being Tom Cruise, only faster. In Digger he plays someone else entirely, and I could not take my eyes off him. I have never seen him like this. His Digger Rockwell is an oil tycoon with the American president on speed dial, a man so used to being obeyed that a catastrophe becomes, for him, a matter of managing the story, and Cruise commits to him completely, which is what makes the comedy land. He wears a fat suit and unkempt white hair, and he disappears into both.

The trouble starts in Greenland. An explosion at Digger’s rig kills everyone on it and breaks an ice shelf loose, and the ice begins to drift toward Europe. Digger’s first instinct is to say nothing, wait to see whether the ice misses Europe, and work out how to profit from the wreckage if it does not. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs and shares the screenplay credit with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman.

That decision is the film’s real subject. The explosion is only the first failure. The silence afterwards is the deliberate one, and a good deal of what follows grows out of it. Iñárritu and his writers go after money that buys access to power, and after the machinery that makes such power comfortable to live under: a pastor praying over the president, an ‘AI firewall’ that scrubs social media. Nobody here is being subtle. I do not think the film wants to be, because satire that whispers gets ignored, and the link between oil money and political power is something we have grown very good at ignoring.

Does it earn its anger? I think it does, because I read the film as an argument about a system, with Digger as one part of it. Digger, the president, the pastor, and the media machinery that smooths everything over each carry a share of the blame. Satire this broad can slide into a lecture. Here the exaggeration works as evidence; if a caricature feels uncomfortably close to a news headline, that is the caricature doing its job. A story about an oilman who hides a disaster so that he can control how it is told feels painfully current, and the film is complex enough to treat the cover-up as dangerous in its own right.

John Goodman plays President Compson, Riz Ahmed plays the scientist Ganesh, and Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons complete the company. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it on 35mm VistaVision, and the unusual compositions give the story a scale to match the disaster.

Responses have been divided, and I understand why. The film is loud and relentlessly profane, and it spares no one in its path, believers included; RogerEbert.com’s reviewer found it smug, and The Film Stage called it stale. Good satire annoys somebody.

My one complaint is length. At just over two hours it is not a marathon, but it felt long to me at times, and I think the film could have made its points more quickly without losing any of their force.

For me, though, this is one of the most provocative and relevant pieces of satire I have seen in a long time, because it says what needs saying in the way only satire can and then leaves you to decide what to do about it. It won’t please everyone but you won’t know that until you see it.