A Scream in an Empty Cinema: Iñárritu’s Digger and Our Collective Performance․ PART 1

Part 1 · The film, the performance and our responsibility

This article contains spoilers for the film.

The screening time could hardly have been better chosen. There were only three of us in the cinema, and one person walked out halfway through. In that almost empty, extraordinarily quiet auditorium, I watched a film that, by contrast, seems to be screaming at the world at the top of its lungs. Later, that contradiction became one of my most vivid memories of the screening: the film is screaming, and the auditorium is empty.

In recent years, I have often thought about the public role of the artist. To what extent is an artist obliged to comment on the events of their time, to speak out, or to declare a position? My answer has become increasingly clear: an artist’s most important response to the world is their work. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s recent films interest me especially from this perspective. Bardo was photographed by Darius Khondji, and Digger by Emmanuel Lubezki—two of my favourite cinematographers. Both films have faced harsh criticism. Yet to me, they reinforce a conviction: Iñárritu seems more concerned with what he needs to say than with making a film that will be comfortably received. He asks us to look at things that have become so familiar that we no longer truly see them.

The synopsis of Digger is essentially this: “The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he has unleashed destroys everything.” That single sentence already contains the film’s central contradiction: a man sets out to save a world he himself has damaged. But for me, this is not only Digger’s story. In different ways and to different degrees, that contradiction belongs to all of us. [1]

When Reality Becomes a Performance (and Vice Versa)

At the beginning of the film, we meet Digger, a man who appears to have no problems within the world he has built for himself. Everything around him bends to his will; not even the first news of a global catastrophe disturbs his confidence. When the threat finally draws close to him, the action moves to the seat of power, into the presence of the US president. The language we hear there is familiar from television and social media. Real political rhetoric can already sound so absurd that its grotesque counterpart on screen sometimes feels almost documentary.

“The most powerful nation,” “the strongest army,” “the all-powerful man”: such phrases are delivered with absolute confidence until, in a single movement, nature exposes how fragile that confidence is. Neither political influence nor military force can issue orders to an iceberg. Faced with catastrophe, all the symbols of power suddenly begin to resemble stage props. For me, Iñárritu is less interested in revealing a new truth than in making us hear something we have known for a long time but have gradually become numb to.

From the earliest visual transitions, vast, seemingly boundless images of nature begin to merge with curtains and constructed sets. Later, we discover that much of what we have been watching belongs to the theatrical production Fossil Fools, and that Tom Cruise is also portraying the actor performing in that production. Some critics see this turn as a device that diminishes the dramatic weight of everything that came before. [2], [3] I see it differently. You know you are watching a play; you can see its theatrical conventions, yet you continue to believe in that world and experience it as real. As the story progresses, the theatrical presence becomes increasingly pronounced until stage and reality are almost inseparable. The amount of time devoted to what happens backstage feels entirely sufficient to me: that world reveals itself only as much as it needs to, and the story arrives naturally at its conclusion.

The film’s loud, grotesque style has also attracted criticism. [2], [4] I can understand the objection: deliberate exaggeration does not, in itself, guarantee successful satire. Yet during my screening, that very exaggeration created the necessary discomfort. We have grown so accustomed to the noise of public life, where tragedy can become just another news spectacle within moments, that sometimes only an amplification of that noise can make us hear it again.

In a setting reminiscent of a grand state hall, everything can appear luxurious and immaculate while, in the adjoining space, water drips from the ceiling. That simple contrast feels like a model of our public life: we construct convincing façades while the structure behind them is collapsing. For me, this is one of the film’s defining qualities. Its images are sometimes openly metaphorical, but their metaphors work precisely because of their simplicity.

The Unseen Catastrophe and the Unbroken Monologue

One scene that particularly struck me shows people reacting to an approaching iceberg. Throughout the sequence, Iñárritu never shows us what the characters are looking at: we do not see a single shot of the iceberg. Instead, the camera stays with their faces, their tense anticipation and their reactions. We do not measure the scale of the disaster through a ready-made visual effect; we construct it in our imagination. To me, that unseen image is more powerful than a direct depiction of the catastrophe would have been.

It reminded me of a masterclass by Terry George in which he discussed the scene in Hotel Rwanda where a vehicle drives over human bodies. As I remember it, his emphasis was on the possibility of conveying horror through sound, the sensation of the situation and the audience’s imagination, without showing everything explicitly. The two films are entirely different, but the principle raises the same intriguing question: what does a story gain when a director dares to withhold an essential image?

A contrasting, yet equally deliberate, choice can be found in the approximately ten-minute speech in parliament, filmed as a single continuous take. In one scene, Iñárritu refuses to show what the characters are looking at; in the other, he refuses to interrupt the action with an edit. In an interview with Definition Magazine, Lubezki explains that Cruise’s performance builds in intensity over the course of the uninterrupted shot, becoming almost physical. Breaking the scene into separate takes would have made it difficult to preserve that same internal rhythm and momentum. [1]

For me, this distinction gets to the heart of the difference between technique used for display and direction in service of the story. In the first case, the image we are denied sets our imagination to work. In the second, the continuity of time allows us to experience the performer’s mounting energy. Even the limitations of VistaVision were made subordinate to that idea: a film magazine allowed for less than ten minutes of shooting, so the extended parliamentary scene was shot digitally rather than interrupt Cruise’s performance. [1]

The conspicuously visible mannequins in the parliamentary chamber are no careless oversight, either. Lubezki recalls using the technique on Michael Mann’s Ali and later on Birdman, where the intention was that the audience would not notice the mannequins. In Digger, the aim was the opposite: to make their artificiality unmistakable. As he explains it, those figures are like people sitting in the chamber without opinions of their own. What could be mistaken for a technical lapse becomes a deliberate visual metaphor for the world being portrayed. [1]

When the Truth Is Drowned Out

One of the film’s most painful moments, for me, is Ganesh’s speech, swallowed by the noise of the room. He tries to speak the truth about Digger, but the people around him seem no longer capable of listening. Then Digger addresses the same crowd, and every confident, forceful statement provokes a new reaction. In the courtroom scene, the statue of Themis, the surroundings and the clothes of the shouting crowd seem to belong to a single colour scheme, while Digger’s burgundy suit sets him apart like a foreign presence. Colour also helps us see the dynamics of power: a man who can turn the mood of a crowd, then walk away while the people are already fighting one another.

Some critics have interpreted Digger’s speech about oil as a manipulation intended to evade his own responsibility. [4] What I see in it, first of all, is an uncomfortable reality. In today’s world, the guilty and the innocent seem to have been thrown into the same pot. We condemn oil producers while relying on their products every day. Cars, aircraft, our everyday comforts and our digital lives depend on systems whose consequences trouble us. And when someone speaks about this contradiction too bluntly, it is easy to dismiss them as merely exaggerating.

That does not, of course, mean that an individual consumer and a vast corporation bear the same degree of responsibility. The distinction matters. But to me, the film is a reminder that unequal levels of responsibility do not erase our own participation. We want to save the world while changing as little as possible about the habits that harm it. We can condemn pollution and then carry on living as though we had nothing to do with it. Digger is the grandest, most arrogant embodiment of that contradiction, but he is not its only participant.

One of the film’s sharpest ironies, to me, is the point in his speech about how society loves cars and TikTok, and even asks ChatGPT how to escape ChatGPT. The issue is no longer simply oil: we depend on systems while dreaming of being free of them. That is why I disagree with the claim that the film merely repeats truths we already know. Art is not obliged to uncover new information. Sometimes its task is to present what we already know in a way that makes it impossible to go on pretending we have not noticed. [5]

Continued in “When Ideas Become Images: The Visual World of Digger” (Part 2).

Sources and References

1. Oliver Webb, Definition Magazine — Interview with Emmanuel Lubezki, 17 October 2026 Source
2. Philip Concannon, BFI / Sight and Sound — “Digger: an unwieldy but compulsively watchable satire,” 2 October 2026 Source
3. Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com — Review of Digger, 29 September 2026 Source
4. Owen Gleiberman, Variety — Review of Digger, 29 September 2026 Source
5. Digger (2026), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu — on-screen events and spoken lines