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Parents' Guide to

Dig

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 17+

Brutal violence in generic father-daughter hostage thriller.

Movie R 2022 90 minutes
Dig Movie: Poster

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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What's the Story?

In DIG, Scott Brennan (Thomas Jane) goes looking for his errant teen daughter, Jane (Harlow Jane), and finds her in a sleazy bar. While arguing on the way home, Jane and her parents nearly get into an accident. When Brennan confronts the other driver, his wife is shot and killed, and Jane loses her hearing. A year later, father and daughter are trying to cope. A stranger named Vic (Emile Hirsch) approaches Brennan at his salvage company and offers him a lucrative job. At an abandoned house in the desert, Brennan is to dig up the patio and help recover something that's buried underneath. Brennan brings Jane along on the job, and they accidentally discover money, lots of it, hidden in the walls of the house. Before long, two masked figures -- really Vic and his girlfriend, Lola (Liana Liberato) -- show up and hold Brennan and Jane at gunpoint. Brennan knows that they'll stay alive as long as they keep digging, but can he eventually find a way to get himself and his daughter out safely?

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

This generic thriller has its moments, but it struggles to come up with reasons to keep the four main characters together, and it stumbles all too frequently. From the first moments of Dig, which depict Brennan and Jane's life-changing tragedy, scenes are shaped in ways that, rather than generating sympathy, make you frustrated with the characters' rash, unthinking actions. Further frustrating are their silly, futile attempts to escape from Vic and Lola, without ever having much of a plan; even the final moments feel somehow unfinished and unsatisfying.

For their part, Vic and Lola are like a low-budget version of Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers, expressing their psychotic love for each other and cracking jokes over their fresh kill. Both Hirsch and Liberato wildly overact in their roles, a poor decision for such a small-scale movie that would have benefited from more subtlety. And while Jane's real-life daughter, Harlow, does a fine job as "Jane" (honestly, couldn't the writers have changed the character's name?), more authentic casting for a deaf character might have been preferable. All in all, Dig could have been a tense, small-scale chess game, but instead it just winds up in the dirt.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about Dig's violence. How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

  • How does the movie depict deafness? How do you feel about the film's deaf character being played by a hearing performer?

  • Much of the movie's violence is directed at women, especially a 17-year-old girl. Do these scenes feel different from other violent scenes in the movie?

  • How does the movie demonstrate compassion and forgiveness with the protagonists? How do the villains model opposite behavior?

  • How is sex depicted? For Lola, is sex about love? Trust? Power? How so?

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