I've already seen Digger twice...this is bold and often brilliant film-making: BRIAN VINER reviews Tom Cruise's latest film

At the end of last week's world premiere of Digger – which was also the Royal Film Performance – many of us headed for the exits so perplexed by what we'd just seen that it didn't seem especially odd, when we got there, to find that we weren't allowed to leave the cinema.

Digger is so bizarre that I wasn't alone in wondering whether we were all caught up in a brazen piece of performance art, barricaded into the Odeon Leicester Square as an unwitting part of the narrative.

In fact, the explanation was more prosaic. We just had to wait until the Prince and Princess of Wales had safely departed, along with their entourage. 

But you get the picture. Alejandro G Inarritu's darkly comic satire leaves the imagination reeling.

The title character, a super-rich Texan oil tycoon, is played by Tom Cruise, barely recognisable under prosthetics that subvert Hollywood norms. 

Grey, jowly, balding and pot-bellied, 64-year-old Cruise as Digger Rockwell, ruthlessly acquisitive boss of Rockwell Oil, at long last looks his age. 

I've already seen Digger twice...this is bold and often brilliant film-making: BRIAN VINER reviews Tom Cruise's latest film Digger (pictured Ross Hatt and Tom Cruise) 

Digger feels like a homage to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove, with environmental disaster supplanting nuclear warfare as the principal threat to humanity (pictured John Goodman) 

At the start, Digger has two pressing problems. His precious elderly cat, who shares his bed, has leukaemia. And his workforce, drilling in Greenland, are at mortal risk following a methane leak.

Characteristically, Digger is more concerned about his pet. His enormous baronial home might be festooned with the spoils of his hunting trips but his one true love is a dying cat.

Soon, though, the Greenland issue intensifies. Following a terrible explosion, a huge chunk of the polar ice shelf breaks off and appears to be heading for Europe at 'alarming velocity', with potentially cataclysmic consequences.

The autocratic US president (John Goodman) and his cabinet arrive at Digger's mansion to discuss the situation, explained to them by Digger's nervy head of environmental safety (Riz Ahmed).

All this is laceratingly satirical, with Goodman's President Compson whooping it up as a bad-tempered vulgarian, whose cabinet meetings resound with racism and sexism yet conclude with a clergyman leading prayers.

The not-unreasonable assumption that Compson might be modelled on an actual world leader, one eager to tap natural resources in Greenland and with 'drill, baby, drill' as his energy policy, encourages us to think we have the measure of the story.

Yet about half an hour in we are confounded by a major twist I will not divulge, not least because there are subsequent twists within the twist. 

I should add that as an audaciously original story-teller, Inarritu has form, with credits including Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), for which he won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Director.

Yet with Digger he goes a step or two further. At the world premiere, Cruise described it as 'next-level filmmaking'. I can see what he means. Whether everyone will want to join him on the next level is another matter.

Digger feels like a homage to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove, with environmental disaster supplanting nuclear warfare as the principal threat to humanity.

The film's main message, relayed via a bravura speech that Digger delivers to a grey assembly of European politicians, is that, as relentless consumers, we are all complicit in our own downfall.

I've already seen Digger twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, knowing the twists from the start. 

First time round, I felt it got tangled in its own conceit and artifice, becoming not just baffling but self-indulgent.

Nonetheless, this is bold and often brilliant film-making, with deserved whispers of Oscar nominations for Inarritu, Cruise and Goodman, and fabulous supporting performances from Ahmed, Sandra Huller and Jesse Plemons, not to mention an animatronic cat.