Digger

by Chris Stewart 10.2026

Less a timely political satire, and more a fantasia in which its maker wants to have a chat very specifically with you – yes, you! – about whether satire actually means anything; Digger swaggers into cineplexes at exactly the wrong time. 

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the high stylist and back-to-back Best Director Oscar winner (2014’s Birdman and 2015’s The Revenant) has a lot on his mind. Or at least, one thing on his mind very alotly. 

Digger invites us into the world of a very rich man who has caused an enormous disaster. The scene: our plantation-tongued, scraggly billionaire is called upon to stave off cataclysm. The staging? His marble Xanadu where flunkies and advisors are constantly entering and exiting; mugging in between apoplectic conversations.

 What luck that in a performance both blustering and delicate, Tom Cruise as “Digger” Rockwell, has found a way to double and even triple the layers of artifice. It is a lush, surprising film in its structure and production. It is also ugly. Iñárritu’s waxwork American powerbrokers are so ghoulish, Digger plays more like a walk-through art exhibit than a film. I found it so immersive as to be abstracted from any actual anger, and therefore much more bearable and structurally evocative than it might have been.

In the end, I was most surprised to find it a tender work, partly because of Cruise, and partly because of a quiet streak of intellectual generosity in Iñárritu, who has found a tool in humility. This is helpful. He has gone through the looking glass and not lost his sense of fun. It accomplishes something dreamy and sad. 

Some may take exception to the fact that Iñárritu seems to both care and not care about the given issues at hand.. For this reviewer, it added to the intrigue. We engage here with the filmmaker directly. A pretentious idea? Fair enough. I quite enjoyed it.

On the surface, it is jarring. Uninviting. Out of respect for the layers of the film, I won’t mention how Iñárritu gives us more than what at first appears. But before long, we are confronted with a new way to consider things. The willing viewer will be rewarded.

So what’s the game?

Iñárritu wants to neither skewer nor extol the presented scenario. He is interested in a world closer to the Being John Malkovich’s scene where the man enters the portal into his own mind and sees himself everywhere – all faces Malkovich, all words Malkovich. Only here, it’s Digger Rockwell, and it’s also us, and the café is on fire, and we’re asked if we’d like dessert. And for a long moment, as people run for the exits, as the kitchen erupts into further flames, and as heavy pieces of the ceiling begin to fall, we think, well, maybe we do?

“Nor am I the captain of my soul,” said Huxley, “but merely its noisiest passenger”. Mr. Iñárritu, I fear, may have taken this to be a challenge.

Digger

Run Time: 129 minutes

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu