At the conclusion of last week’s star-studded world premiere of Digger—which also served as the prestigious Royal Film Performance—many audience members headed for the exits feeling so thoroughly perplexed by what they had just witnessed that it scarcely seemed odd, upon reaching the doors, to discover they were not permitted to leave the cinema.
Digger is a film so genuinely bizarre that this reviewer was far from alone in briefly wondering whether we had all unwittingly become participants in a brazen piece of conceptual performance art, barricaded inside the Odeon Leicester Square as an unscripted, captive part of the narrative architecture. In truth, the explanation proved to be rather more prosaic. The audience simply had to wait patiently until the Prince and Princess of Wales had safely departed the building, alongside their extensive royal entourage and security detail.
Yet, that surreal initial confusion aptly captures the spirit of the evening. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s darkly comic satire is a cinematic experience that leaves the imagination reeling, challenging standard audience expectations from its very first frames.
The titular character, a toweringly wealthy and ruthlessly ambitious Texan oil tycoon, is brought to life by Tom Cruise. In a radical departure from his decades-long status as one of Hollywood’s definitive leading men, Cruise is rendered almost entirely unrecognisable beneath extensive prosthetics that deliberately subvert traditional cinematic norms. Grey, jowly, balding, and notably pot-bellied, the 64-year-old superstar portrays Digger Rockwell, the relentless chief executive of Rockwell Oil, and in doing so, finally looks every bit his character’s age with weathered authenticity.
This bold cinematic venture feels unmistakably like a conscious homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cinematic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, with ecological catastrophe and environmental disaster effectively supplanting nuclear warfare as the primary, looming existential threat to humanity.
At the story’s outset, Digger Rockwell is grappling with two fiercely pressing, albeit drastically mismatched, problems. His most precious companion—an elderly cat that shares his bed—is suffering from terminal leukaemia. Simultaneously, his corporate workforce, currently engaged in high-stakes drilling operations deep in the unforgiving terrain of Greenland, is placed in mortal jeopardy following a catastrophic methane leak.
In a manner entirely characteristic of his cold, autocratic nature, Digger is visibly far more concerned about the failing health of his feline pet than the safety of his employees. While his enormous, baronial Texan mansion is heavily festooned with the brutal spoils of his many hunting expeditions, his one true emotional attachment remains exclusively fixed on his dying cat.
Before long, however, the unfolding crisis in Greenland escalates dramatically. Following a massive, uncontrolled explosion, an unprecedentedly huge chunk of the polar ice shelf fractures and breaks off, appearing to drift southward toward Europe at an alarming and unprecedented velocity, carrying with it potentially cataclysmic global consequences.
In response to the escalating emergency, the autocratic United States President, played with unhinged bombast by John Goodman, and his entire cabinet abruptly arrive at Digger’s remote mansion to assess the unfolding situation. The technicalities of the disaster are laid out for them by Digger’s visibly high-strung and nervy head of environmental safety, portrayed with jittery precision by Riz Ahmed.
All of this unfolds as a laceratingly sharp satire. Goodman’s President Compson whoops it up as a bad-tempered, aggressively vulgar populist whose high-level cabinet meetings regularly resound with casual racism and casual sexism, only to bizarrely conclude with a local clergyman leading the assembled politicians in public prayers.
The not-unreasonable working assumption among viewers is that President Compson might be closely modelled on a contemporary, real-world political figure—one eagerly obsessed with tapping natural resources in the Arctic and championing an unyielding ‘drill, baby, drill’ energy policy. This apparent familiarity encourages the audience to lean back, confident that they have accurately measured the satirical trajectory of the story.
Yet, roughly half an hour into the runtime, the narrative is abruptly upended by a major, structural plot twist—a development best left undisclosed here, not least because it serves as the gateway to subsequent twists nested intricately within the twist itself.
It is worth noting that as an audaciously original and uncompromising storyteller, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has considerable form in confounding expectations. His previous directorial credits include acclaimed triumphs such as Birdman in 2014 and The Revenant in 2015, consecutive achievements for which he earned back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Director.
Yet, with Digger, Iñárritu pushes his distinct cinematic sensibilities a step or two further into uncharted territory. Speaking at the world premiere, Tom Cruise aptly described the project as "next-level filmmaking." It is a description that rings entirely true, though whether every filmgoer will willingly choose to follow the auteur onto that particular next level remains an open question.
The film’s ultimate underlying message is communicated most explicitly via a bravura, impassioned speech delivered by Digger to a sombre, grey assembly of European politicians, in which he argues that humanity, through its relentless culture of consumption, is entirely complicit in its own environmental downfall.
Having already viewed Digger twice, this reviewer found the second viewing a substantially more rewarding experience, having known the intricacies of the narrative twists from the very beginning. During the initial viewing, it was easy to feel that the film occasionally became tangled in its own high-concept conceit and dense artifice, tipping over the edge from merely baffling into something approaching self-indulgence.
Nonetheless, this remains a remarkably bold and frequently brilliant piece of filmmaking. Already, there are well-deserved whispers circulating regarding potential Academy Award nominations for Iñárritu, Cruise, and Goodman, alongside fabulous, standout supporting performances delivered by Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons, not to mention a surprisingly memorable turn by an animatronic cat.
Digger arrives in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
