5 Movies Like Tom Cruise’s Digger to Watch Next

‘Digger’ will not work for everyone. But if its bleak, outrageous sense of humour connected with you, the five films below should be right up your street. Tom Cruise’s apocalyptic comedy has sharply divided critics, including our own, and audiences, while projections suggest it could become the year’s biggest box-office bomb. There have even been rumours that the two Warner Bros. executives who approved the project lost their jobs. Whatever your view of the film, the studio deserves credit for backing such an enormous creative gamble. Cinema needs films made for artistic reasons rather than guaranteed commercial returns, and ‘Digger’ is an unusually bold experiment at blockbuster scale. If you shared its dark comic outlook, these five similarly uncompromising films are well worth exploring.

A spoiler warning is necessary before we continue. We will be discussing key developments in ‘Digger’ — for a fuller breakdown, read our ending explained article — because its twists and tonal shifts bring to mind a surprising number of cult movies. Several of these films took daring creative risks that audiences initially rejected, only to become overlooked favourites or titles now ripe for reassessment. Read on if you’re ready to take the plunge.

When ‘Digger’ reveals around the 30-minute mark that its events are unfolding during the final dress rehearsal of a satirical Broadway revival, the obvious comparison is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s backstage comedy ‘Birdman’. That film also follows a cast and director battling to mount a new version of a classic play, combining show-business satire with surreal episodes across New York. Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ is another strong parallel: its marketing concealed the fact that it was secretly about an acting company putting on a production.

Presented as Wes Anderson’s tribute to 1950s B-movies, the all-star, deadpan comedy follows extraterrestrial sightings in a small desert town. It eventually reveals itself as a stage play, with Anderson moving between the science-fiction story and a vintage documentary about its creation. Bryan Cranston’s omniscient narrator even steps into the fictional world, blurring the boundary between performance and reality.

For a filmmaker often criticised by detractors for prioritising style over substance, Anderson uses ‘Asteroid City”s documentary framework to explain his elaborate storytelling and the feeling beneath his highly controlled, deadpan dialogue. Its ambitious approach was received more warmly than ‘Digger”s, perhaps because it offers a more inviting view of artistic creation. After Iñárritu’s despairing comedy, Anderson’s film provides the feel-good counterpoint.

Because Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise’ was released by Netflix, it was impossible to know whether it would become the huge box-office failure many expected. The $140 million adaptation of Don DeLillo’s postmodern 1985 novel nevertheless invites comparisons with ‘Digger’. Netflix showed considerable nerve by financing an absurdist disaster movie that satirises 1980s social fears and the era’s liberal reliance on medication. Like Iñárritu’s film, it spends a substantial budget on dark social commentary without worrying about alienating viewers.

Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, the kind of unconventional protagonist who is far removed from the heroes of a typical Amblin family adventure — precisely the formula Baumbach sets out to undermine. Jack teaches ‘Hitler Studies’ and becomes increasingly troubled by his wife’s growing dependence on Dylar, a mysterious drug that does not appear in any official records. Greta Gerwig plays his wife.

When a toxic cloud forces the family to flee the city, the ensuing crisis becomes a vehicle for exploring Jack’s fear of death. Baumbach frames that dread as a parody of America’s nuclear-age anxieties, creating cinema that is deliberately uncommercial while wearing the outward appearance of a blockbuster. Admirers of ‘Digger’ should recognise and appreciate the scale of the gamble.

Following the cult success of ‘Donnie Darko’, Richard Kelly’s second feature was among the most anticipated films at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival — and one of the most savagely criticised. If ‘Digger’ represents one of the boldest satires of the Trump 2.0 era, Kelly’s sprawling, unruly ‘Southland Tales’ deserves attention as an equally fearless assault on George W. Bush’s second term. It imagines a dystopian 2008 after nuclear attacks on Texas. Kelly’s first draft, written before 9/11, was a more direct satire of Hollywood, but the project expanded into a broader examination of the war on terror, state surveillance and climate anxiety. As in Iñárritu’s film, high-minded ideas collide with deliberately crude humour.

That description barely covers its sprawling plot, which is too dense to summarise fully. An amnesiac action star played by Dwayne Johnson, a psychic adult-film actress portrayed by Sarah Michelle Gellar and the leader of an underground Marxist group, played by Seann William Scott, become entangled as Los Angeles falls into anarchy. The story also unfolds against World War III and the scheme of a mad scientist, played by Wallace Shawn, who wants to conquer the world using a renewable energy source. ‘Southland Tales’ has so many layers that it has become less bewildering with time. In 2006, Kelly seemed to be parodying everything at once; today, the film can feel startlingly prophetic.

Anyone with a serious interest in cinema probably thought of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire while watching ‘Digger’. ‘Dr Strangelove’ similarly transforms apocalyptic fears into dark comedy, and its influence appears particularly clear in some of Iñárritu’s character work, especially the military chief of staff Fitzgerald, played by Robert John Burke.

Burke’s performance feels like a composite of the paranoid military men gathered in Kubrick’s war room. ‘Digger’ likewise builds towards a government blundering its way into nuclear conflict with Russia. Although ‘Dr Strangelove’ was rooted in Cold War tensions, its concerns remain uncomfortably current, and ‘Digger”s echoes of the film demonstrate how deeply those ideas remain embedded in popular culture. Collective fears of global destruction have not disappeared; both films turn that anxiety into bleak laughter.

Peter Sellers earned an Oscar nomination for playing three contrasting characters: the titular nuclear expert with a concealed Nazi past, the restrained RAF officer Mandrake and the ineffectual President Merkin Muffley. Like ‘Digger’, Kubrick’s film uses absurdity to prevent viewers from being overwhelmed by the sight of world leaders failing to avert nuclear armageddon, before ending on a deeply unsettling note. Its status as one of cinema’s great arthouse comedies is well deserved, and when ‘Digger’ star Jesse Plemons called his film a modern ‘Dr Strangelove’, he was drawing a comparison with real significance.

The first trailer for ‘Digger’ sparked discussion about its deliberately unusual visual style. Although the film was presented in IMAX and VistaVision, its sets are dominated by a muted palette, while the pale ensemble appears to merge with the intricately designed interiors. Iñárritu has denied that the film was intended as an homage, but the look recalls the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, whose absurdist arthouse tragicomedies have also explored the pressures and fears of modern life.

‘You, The Living’, Andersson’s 2007 film, is perhaps the best introduction to his work. It was also selected by Iñárritu as one of the 10 greatest films ever made in his 2022 Sight & Sound poll ballot. The movie unfolds through 50 brief vignettes, each filmed in a single static shot rather than ‘Digger”s more fluid approach. Even so, the drained colours and meticulous production design create clear visual parallels.

Andersson’s humour is even more deadpan, occasionally breaking the fourth wall and bursting into song as a collection of unhappy Swedes confront their dreams and everyday worries. It is uncompromisingly arthouse, but never humourless: the film contains several genuine belly laughs, including a man’s disastrous attempt at a magic trick — you will know the scene — that remains a strong contender for the funniest moment of the 2000s. If ‘Digger’ spoke to you, ‘You, The Living’ could be the ideal offbeat crowd-pleaser.