You may not end up watching this movie, dissuaded by bad reviews and potentially negative word-of-mouth, but you will surely hear a lot about Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. Sometimes, however, the first audience is not always the right one for a particular project. So, here is another reviewer who has been asked to hold back from explaining more than what is permitted and revealing too much about what will be discovered. Forgive my vague language (and this necessary intro) while I try to tell you why you should actually go see this exciting and relentless movie in the best format possible (VistaVision for the win, with IMAX and Dolby as alternatives).

Defined as a comedy of catastrophic proportions and written by the director in collaboration with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman, Digger is a satire of absurd situations built around socially and politically relevant themes. It will not necessarily make you laugh so much as it will make you acknowledge, with a resigned smirk, that no exaggeration can do justice to our often cartoonish reality. An explosion in the Arctic between Alaska and Greenland threatens to cause a natural disaster that could claim the lives of millions of people across the European continent, marking the beginning of a global crisis.

Texas oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, incapable of holding his tongue, is portrayed with volcanic glee by Tom Cruise. Rockwell becomes the default culprit as the owner of the company mining the area. However, government permits granted in pursuit of profit suggest that President Compton (John Goodman) also deserves a generous share of the responsibility. Portrayed as an authoritarian, stubborn man with a fondness for misogynistic jokes, Compton is not an attempt to draw a direct correlation with current or past residents of the White House (even if the description suggests otherwise), but rather an embodiment of the archetypal figure who enjoys power without the burden that comes with it. One important detail: He suffers from the most undignified form of cancer imaginable. Let’s just say he howls in pain if he sits down without taking the utmost care.

The leader of the free world is not the only sick being in the bizarre universe of Digger. So is Digger’s elderly cat, whom its owner refuses to put down. (It is actually a puppet that expresses pathos and revulsion in equal measure.) The same could be said for a convulsing planet affected by the decisions of men behind closed doors—men who, when asking about projected losses from an uncontrollable disaster, never mean the human cost, but rather the money invested. Yet perhaps Digger, obsessed with his own mythology, can be the cowboy willing to save the day and ride into the sunset of glory. Iñárritu is considerably less optimistic.

Twenty minutes in, Digger can already feel excruciating and exhausting, packed with constantly yelling characters and hysterical jokes. An excellent Cruise meets the demands of sustaining layers of ambiguity around his character’s identity, balancing on an impossible boundary between psychopathy and empathy. However, I suggest you avoid letting yourselves be overwhelmed by the feeling of “too much.” Try to let yourself go and yield to the experience. For starters, you will appreciate the intricate beauty of the production design and Emmanuel Lubezki’s always-majestic talent as cinematographer. You will eventually arrive at a twist—not of plot, but of conceit—that blooms with one of the most astounding images I have seen this year. More surprises follow. It is almost inevitable that Digger will join a lineage of recent big, bold auteur follies whose esteem will likely increase with the passage of time precisely because of the same rebellion and excess that initially condemned them: Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux.

Do not confuse its humanistic desperation with heartless cynicism. Digger is very loud about its message and intentions, serving as a call to arms while there is still time. It is also a hopeful fable about the survival of art as something capable of bringing people together in times of despair while recognizing a responsibility that must not be neglected: Do not drug your audience with self-indulgent solutions, but leave them with something they can take home so that returning to the outside world feels less sad and lonely, even when it is far from comforting.