The looming disaster is a glacier five times the size of Washington, DC, that Digger’s drilling has knocked loose. It’s called Judy, and she’s raging towards Europe. The news soon reaches President Compson (John Goodman), who turns up at Digger’s mansion with his vice president, Eddie (Michael Stuhlbarg), in tow. The question in the room is less how to fix the earth-shattering catastrophe than how best to tell the Europeans. Riz Ahmed is the film’s conscience as Dr Nirav Ganesh, Digger’s head of environmental safety and the one man with the facts. The ever-brilliant Sandra Hüller gives both a terrible and masterful performance as Emma, Digger’s hot-headed half-sister, while Jesse Plemons plays his “nephew” Kenny. Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy take on roles I simply can’t spoil.

It’s been a long time coming. Alejandro González Iñárritu, the mastermind behind Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant, first dreamt up Digger straight after finishing The Revenant in 2015, a full decade before it hit screens. He and Cruise started talking about it around 2019, while Cruise was off filming Top Gun: Maverick, and rather than just handing over a script, Iñárritu spent days reading it aloud to him. He wrote it with his Birdman co-writers Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, plus Sabina Berman, and produced it alongside Mary Parent, Michael Sharp and Cruise himself. They shot for six months in the UK under the working title Judy, entirely on VistaVision, with Iñárritu’s longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on board, wrapping in May 2025.

The official budget sits at $125 million, though reports have it ballooning closer to $180 million after the shoot ran long. Considering what a headlining Cruise must cost, it sounds like they got a great deal.

For all the gasps and giggles that flooded the cinema in the opening scenes, it’s a Brechtian switch in the story (one I can’t share; the spoiler would be too great) that will get people talking long after the credits roll. It welcomes in a world of satire, one that Iñárritu, for me at least, could have doubled down on a million times over. Add in Cruise’s brilliant performance, and a bolder director could have gotten away with far more strangeness than he did. I would have preferred a harder swing.