A synopsis can’t do it justice, really—and so, while I’m the sort of person who usually scoffs at the Spoiler Police, consider yourself warned: I think you really do have to see Digger cold, which means you have to go through the rug-pull move around a third of the way through and stay with it.

(I was warned in advance that there was a rug-pull, though not of its nature—and it was still jarring, but mostly I think in a good way? But I can well believe that a lot of the negative reviews I’ve seen came from people who are used to being spoonfed superhero rubbish, because it’s really not that bad. I’m not enough of a cineaste to be able to call to mind any obvious precedent, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing here that’s any harder to handle than the average Terry Gilliam movie… but then again, Gilliam’s never really had a mainstream success, presumably for that very reason. I’ll also note that a lot of those negative reviews compare Digger to Megalopolis, and they clearly don’t mean it as a compliment… but given there’s almost no other common ground between the two films that I can think of, it seems to me that the category being constructed is “big, ambitious films that don’t provide the viewer with a pat moral conclusion that will make them feel good about themselves and their politics”, so I guess I’m going to start taking that particular comparison as an indicator of stuff worth seeing.)

Digger is not a play within the play, but rather the play within which there is a play, and the aesthetics of the thing—a kind of surreal realism, for which (now I come to think of it) Gilliam is yet again a useful comparison?—is a huge part of the overall effect. The tone, meanwhile, is on a knife-edge from the get-go, the characters absurd and monstrous but delivering arguments and implications and accusations about the present (our present) which are deeply uncomfortable.

In addition to the two “plays” in play (sorry not sorry), there’s also the subtext (which is really not very sub in a number of places) informing us that to dress up the delay and showboating around climate issues in the present moment as a theatre of monsters (which is what both plays are doing, in slightly different ways) is actually to let ourselves, the viewers, off the hook: that our having turned climate discourse—hell, all discourse—into pantomime, our having reduced the players and the circumstances to grotesque simplifications, has done little to help the situation, and quite possibly a great deal to harm it.

Warren Ellis (from whom came the rug-pull warning) said that Digger is “about why satire is both the worst and the only response to doom”, and I think that’s also a way of explaining a very perceptive remark made immediately afterward by the friend I watched it with, to the effect that it’s the most 2026 movie imaginable, in the best and worst possible ways at once: because it is caught in a simultaneity of doing thrilling performative fury and one-dimensional stereotyping on the one hand, and a terrible tirade aimed at its own theatricality as both trivial and trivialising on the other.

We’re amusing ourselves to death, it tells us—the old Neil Postman line, of course, but now the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak. Whether intentional or not (and I think it is intentional) it’s also a comment on the increasing irrelevance of cinema: a movie can joke about our crises, and about the inadequate leaders we leave to deal with them, and nothing will be changed. But it turns out that a movie can also joke about the inadequacy of that joking, and of our laughter. The more you “get” this film, the more uncomfortable you’ll find yourself, as you realise that you are the real object of its scorn—you, with your abiding sense that you know who the baddies are, that you know how the game is played, and that you’re therefore on the side of the angels by default.

It’s telling, I think, that the film is named for the protagonist of the play within the play, because this directs us to understand that it’s what he says that we should be paying the most attention to. Digger Rockwell is exactly the cartoon parody psychopath oil-man monster that we’ll burn and bash like a cheap piñata when all the bills finally come due… but he is therefore also the jester who gets to say aloud the things that must otherwise go unspoken. The ending of this film is therefore not at its end, but rather in its middle—the axis around which the rest of it rotates, which relationship is mirrored by the very clever set-design of the scene itself. That’s the moment where the message, such as it is, is stated clearly and directly.

Warren again:

It is a film that says the conversation about the climate crisis is already over. It asks only one question: “Now what?”

That’s the question no one can abide hearing—because no one has an answer that doesn’t involve blaming someone else.

And having taken the time to write it out, I now realise that the reason I like this film, and that the reason that (I suspect) a lot of other people really don’t like this film, is because it’s saying something I’ve been saying for years: no one is to blame, but everyone’s complicit.