Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise Upend Expectations with the Audaciously Strange Political Satire ‘Digger’

With Birdman and The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu earned his place in cinema history as the only living filmmaker to win consecutive Academy Awards for Best Director. Now, he returns with what is arguably his most audacious and confounding project to date: Digger. An aggressively strange, expensive, and star-studded production, the film defies easy categorization, leaving even those who have studied its promotional trailers struggling to explain its true nature.

Even after watching the entire feature twice, the film remains remarkably difficult to put into words. On the surface, it functions as a sprawling political satire featuring Tom Cruise heavily disguised in prosthetics to play a cartoonish, larger-than-life oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell. Yet, to describe it merely as a political satire is to miss the point entirely, because Digger is simultaneously something vastly different and far more complex.

To understand the rhythm of the film, it helps to look back at Iñárritu’s 2000 feature-length debut, Amores Perros. That film established the Mexican director’s affinity for tonal subversion, famously shifting tones roughly forty minutes into a dark, disturbing drama for a buoyant, unexpected montage set to the hip-hop track "Si Señor." With Digger, the filmmaker essentially reverses this trick, operating as a tragedy cleverly disguised as a comedy for its opening act.

For the first half-hour, Cruise delivers dialogue with an aggressively snappy, almost screwball cadence. The production design is suspiciously meticulous, and the narrative even incorporates a meowing puppet cat designed explicitly for comic relief. Without warning, however, the tone shifts radically, revealing a picture that bears almost no resemblance to its marketing campaign. Imagine the tonal dissonance of discovering that the promotional poster for The Revenant featured Leonardo DiCaprio happily enjoying a scenic, leisurely boat ride. This major narrative pivot is entirely omitted from the film’s trailer, and Iñárritu himself has specifically requested that reviewers and journalists keep the twist hidden from the public.

Speaking in London in late September, just the morning after the film’s high-profile world premiere, Iñárritu reflects on the unique viewing experience of his audience. "I will never watch Digger the way you did," he says, acknowledging the deliberate architecture of the story’s surprises. "I would have loved to have discovered the film as you did."

Following a similarly revealing screening of his previous film, Bardo, with a crowd at the Venice Film Festival, the 63-year-old director ultimately trimmed fifteen minutes from the final version that landed on Netflix. That communal experience left a lasting impression. "Seeing a film with a real audience, it reveals itself to you," he explains. "Sometimes I have doubts. But yesterday I felt serene. I wasn’t struggling, thinking, ‘This is too slow,’ or, ‘I should have kept that scene.’ It was a pleasant experience, strangely for me."

Despite the director’s post-premiere serenity, the film itself is anything but tranquil. Pushing far past the manic intensity of his motivational speaker character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia—and arguably eclipsing any off-screen accounts of his famous intensity during production—Cruise ferociously spits out spiky, venomous dialogue concerning fossil fuels, his fictional family’s deep Texan roots, and his personal economic value to the United States.

Cruise’s relentless rants are met with equal fury by a stellar ensemble cast. Sandra Hüller plays his equally unhinged and manic sister, John Goodman portrays a heavily misogynistic US President, and Riz Ahmed stars as Ganesh, a brilliant scientist who uncovers a terrifying ecological truth: Digger’s insatiable greed for oil has triggered a catastrophic displacement of an Arctic ice shelf, a climate disaster that threatens the lives of millions if left unchecked.

When the President learns that neutralizing "Judy"—the code name given to the massive iceberg hurtling southward toward Europe—will cost trillions of dollars, Digger proposes a much cheaper alternative. He champions the implementation of "the Firewall," an artificial intelligence-assisted tool designed to scrub politically inconvenient keywords like "global warming" and "Al Gore" entirely from social media feeds and news outlets.

Iñárritu and co-writer Sabina Berman originally penned the first draft of the screenplay back in 2017. "At that time, Sabina and I thought the Firewall was a crazy idea, and now it exists," Iñárritu notes. "Everything Ganesh says is the truth and science-based. I worked with two different scientists, and travelled twice to the Arctic. They told me in thirty years we have a window to react. At that time, there had never been a detached ice shelf. Greenland wasn’t on the map of the United States. And now it is. We were ahead by ten years, and unfortunately that’s where we’re heading."

If there is a cinematic equivalent to the death-defying, headline-grabbing physical stunts that audiences have come to expect from a Mission: Impossible picture, it manifests here as a grueling ten-minute monologue delivered by Cruise. Performed entirely on an elaborate, revolving stage before a crowd of extras whose faces are caked in stark white theatrical makeup, the sequence begs the question of whether Iñárritu, Cruise, and legendary cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki have managed to quietly smuggle the deadpan, absurdist aesthetic of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson straight into mainstream multiplexes.

"I love Roy Andersson, and I know him well," Iñárritu responds when asked about the comparison. "I visit him, and I like his films. But it’s so far from Roy. He hardly moves the camera, and there’s hardly any dialogue. I’m not denying he’s an inspiration—but his inspirations were some of ours."

Instead, the director draws a rich tapestry of visual and artistic influences from classical painting. He points to Vilhelm Hammershøi and Johannes Vermeer for their mastery of color, alongside Rembrandt and Edward Hopper for their dramatic approach to contrast and shadow. "The faces don’t always have that shadowy thing. It’s mainly painters who use light like that. I used that because this is a film about white men taking power, and controlling the world, and operating on this level almost like ghosts. Chivo and I decided that if Digger is ruling the narrative, the colour is vanishing, and there’s the whiteness of the world we’re living in."

For subsequent drafts of the script, writers Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone joined the creative team, allowing Iñárritu to lean heavily into self-aware Spanish-language literature, drawing inspiration from authors like Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, Miguel de Unamuno, and Miguel de Cervantes. During pre-production, the director also screened classic films for his cast to establish tone and rhythm: Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday for its breakneck dialogue timing, Jiří Menzel’s The Firemen’s Ball for its chaotic absurdity, and Sidney Lumet’s Network for its powerhouse speechifying. In the background of several scenes, sharp-eyed viewers can spot subtle set decoration, including vintage posters for John Cassavetes’ Opening Night and Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be, which famously satirized Adolf Hitler during the height of World War II.

Shot entirely using VistaVision cameras, the film packs every corner of its widescreen frame with dense thematic details. While the primary narrative focuses on the upper echelons of power—politicians, billionaires, and background extras who evoke the stylized figures of Andersson’s cinema—the film also pauses to examine the reality facing the general public outside the iron gates of Digger’s mansion. A piece of ironic graffiti spray-painted onto a stark concrete urban wall encapsulates the bleak subtext: "COMPLIANCE IS FREEDOM." The visual motif serves as a blunt reminder that society at large, not just the cartoonish billionaire at the top, must re-evaluate its complicity in the current global order.

Discussing the volatile tonal shifts that take the film from broad slapstick comedy and screwball pratfalls to harrowing dramatic depths, Iñárritu emphasizes that the project is fundamentally about the nature of storytelling itself. "The film’s about storytelling," he says. "It’s about the stories we tell ourselves, the futility of art, and the importance of art as a way to explain ourselves when we’re dealing with so much reality. Theatre is a way to represent reality, and that representation is sometimes more real than reality because it allows us to see ourselves—and laugh about ourselves."

He expands on the modern socio-political resonance of the project, directing his commentary squarely at younger generations. "This film is about your generation. You’re dealing with people taking the narrative and telling you that everything is fine, when you guys know that everything is not fine. You are being bombarded with narratives all day. Powerful people are controlling the narrative for their own interests. You have to decide which story you want to tell yourself."

Digger is scheduled for release in UK cinemas on October 2.