Love Tom Cruise’s Digger? Watch These 5 Movies Next

“Digger” will not work for everyone, but viewers who connect with its bleak, eccentric sense of humour will likely find plenty to enjoy in the five films selected here. Tom Cruise’s apocalyptic comedy has split critics, including our own, and audiences, while industry predictions suggest it could become the year’s biggest box-office bomb. Rumours have even claimed that the two Warner Bros. executives who approved the project lost their jobs. Still, the studio deserves credit for backing such an audacious idea on a huge scale. Not every film is made for the charts; some are created for the art, and cinema benefits when a daring project receives this kind of support. If “Digger” spoke to you, these five uncompromising companions should be right up your street.

Spoilers for “Digger” follow. For a closer look at the film’s conclusion, see our ending explained guide. As we explore these recommendations, it is worth noting that the movie’s twists brought to mind a number of cult favourites we never expected before watching it. Several of the films below took even greater creative risks, initially alienating audiences before becoming overlooked gems—or, in some cases, titles now awaiting full critical reassessment. Read on if you are ready to embrace the strange.

At around the 30-minute mark, “Digger” reveals that its apparent story is actually the final dress rehearsal for a satirical Broadway revival. That surprise immediately recalls Alejandro González Iñárritu’s earlier backstage comedy “Birdman”, which follows a cast and director battling to mount a new version of a classic play. Its showbiz satire is matched by surreal episodes spilling onto the streets of New York. Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” is another film whose marketing concealed its true focus: an acting troupe staging a production.

Presented as Wes Anderson’s tribute to 1950s B-movies, “Asteroid City” is a deadpan ensemble comedy about extraterrestrial sightings in a small desert town. It eventually reveals itself as a stage play, shifting between the fictional genre story and a vintage documentary about its creation. Bryan Cranston’s all-knowing announcer even enters the drama itself, erasing the boundary between performance and reality.

For a filmmaker often criticised for prioritising style over substance, Anderson uses “Asteroid City”‘s documentary framework to explain his elaborate storytelling and the emotion beneath its highly precise, deadpan dialogue. His ambitious experiment was received far more warmly than “Digger”, perhaps because it offers a more inviting view of artistic creation. Where Iñárritu’s film leaves viewers staring into the abyss, Anderson delivers the feel-good comedy that can follow it.

Because Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” was released as a Netflix production, it was impossible to know whether it would become the enormous box-office failure many had predicted. Even so, Netflix showed considerable nerve by funding this $140 million absurdist comedy, adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern novel. Its disaster-movie framework satirises 1980s social fears and the era’s dependence on medication, making it a natural comparison with “Digger”: a lavish production willing to repel audiences with dark, pointed commentary.

Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, the kind of unconventional protagonist that attracts directors with costly, commercially questionable passion projects. Jack is the opposite of the typical hero from an Amblin family adventure, the very genre Baumbach is determined to undermine. He teaches “Hitler Studies” and becomes increasingly troubled by his wife Babette’s (Greta Gerwig) dependence on Dylar, a mysterious drug absent from any official records.

When a toxic cloud forces the family to flee the city, the evacuation becomes the starting point for a sustained examination of Jack’s fear of death. Baumbach turns that personal anxiety into a parody of America’s nuclear-age dread. “White Noise” is uncompromising cinema wearing the clothes of a blockbuster, and anyone who admired the scale of “Digger”‘s gamble should appreciate its ambition.

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Following the cult success of “Donnie Darko”, Richard Kelly’s second feature arrived at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival as one of its most anticipated films—and left as one of its most heavily criticised. If “Digger” represents one of the boldest satires of the Trump 2.0 era, the sprawling and unruly “Southland Tales” deserves attention as an equally uncompromising response to 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 straightforward satire of Hollywood, but the project expanded into a broader examination of the war on terror, mass surveillance and climate-change fears. Like Iñárritu’s film, it places high-minded ideas beside deliberately lowbrow comedy.

The plot is so expansive that it is difficult to summarise: an amnesiac action star (Dwayne Johnson), an adult-film actress with psychic powers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and the leader of an underground Marxist group (Seann William Scott) become entangled as Los Angeles collapses into chaos. World War III is also looming, while a mad scientist (Wallace Shawn) plots global domination through a renewable energy source. “Southland Tales” has so many layers that its confusion has softened with time. What seemed in 2006 like an attempt to parody everything now feels eerily prophetic.

Cinephiles will almost certainly have thought of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire while watching “Digger”. Both films turn apocalyptic fears into dark comedy, and Kubrick’s influence appears especially clear in the character of military chief of staff Fitzgerald, played by Robert John Burke.

Burke’s performance seems to combine several of the paranoid military figures gathered in the war room of Kubrick’s masterpiece. “Digger” also builds towards a government blundering into nuclear conflict with Russia. Although “Dr. Strangelove” was shaped by Cold War tensions, its relevance has never truly faded; the way “Digger” echoes it shows how deeply those ideas remain embedded in popular culture. Collective fear of doomsday persists, giving both films plenty of material for grim laughter.

Peter Sellers earned an Oscar nomination for playing three radically different characters: the titular nuclear expert with a concealed Nazi past, the rigid RAF officer Mandrake and the inept President Merkin Muffley. As in “Digger”, Kubrick keeps the tone absurd enough to prevent the audience from sinking into despair as leaders steer the world towards nuclear annihilation—though the ending offers little comfort. Its status as one of cinema’s great arthouse comedies is well deserved, and “Digger” star Jesse Plemons’ description of his film as the modern “Dr. Strangelove” now seems especially telling.

Even before “Digger” arrived, its trailers drew attention to the film’s unusual visual design. Despite its presentation in IMAX and VistaVision, the sets are dominated by muted colours, while the pale ensemble often appears to blend into the ornate interiors. Iñárritu has denied that the film was intended as an homage, but its aesthetic strongly recalls Swedish director Roy Andersson, whose absurdist arthouse tragicomedies explore many of the anxieties of contemporary life.

For newcomers to Andersson, the ideal starting point may be his 2007 film “You, The Living”. Coincidentally, Iñárritu included it among the 10 greatest films ever made on his 2022 Sight & Sound poll ballot. The movie unfolds through 50 short vignettes, using one static camera shot for each scene rather than “Digger”‘s approach, yet the bleached-out imagery and meticulous production design create striking parallels.

Andersson’s humour is even more deadpan, occasionally breaking the fourth wall and, at times, bursting into song, as a succession of unhappy Swedes confront their dreams and everyday worries. It is uncompromising arthouse cinema, but never humourless: genuine belly laughs run throughout. A failed magic trick in one man’s dream—you will know the scene—stands as a strong contender for the funniest movie moment of the 2000s. If you found the right wavelength with “Digger”, “You, The Living” could be exactly the crowd-pleasing oddity you need next.