Title:  Saw

Release Date:  2004

Nationality and Language: USA, English

Running time: 100 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Distributor and Production Company:  Lions Gate Films

Director; Writer: James Wan, wr. Leigh Whannell

Producer:

Cast:  Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Ken Leung, Monica Potter, Makenzie Vega, Michael Emerson, Dina Meyer

Technical: Standard aspect

Relevance to doaskdotell site:  Filmmaking

Review:  Well, the title of this film is a literary device (onomatopoeia). Low budget (just over $1 million), this strikes me as a slick technical exercise in film school, script writing, and story telling.

Two men (a doctor (Cary Elwes) and a private detective (Leigh Whannell, starring in his own film, it seems—although the DVD notes from LGF suggest that the story idea came from both Wan and Whannell in brainstorming—both are quite young) wake up in a dilapidated public restroom, both chained in leg irons, with (seemingly) a corpse between them, and some clues (including rusty, worn hack saws) and tools.  Quickly they figure out that they may well only get out is to amputate their own feet (a la Misery). No great loss; from what we can glimpse, neither man has that much hair on his legs; both men seem a bit like pawns on somebody else’s stage. Yet, either one could have set this up.

The opening scene, with its sparse dialogue, seems like a stage play, or perhaps a filmed play in the “dogma” technique. The story, though, develops in layers. The doctor was a suspect as the “Jigsaw” serial killer, who sets up victims in traps and makes them practically commit suicide to escape, usually having horrible deaths. (“He figures out ways to make them kill themselves.”) One victim, for example, had his bod covered in grease so he would burn to death when he tried to escape. Another almost has her jaw blasted open (good maxillofacial surgery!). The killer has made a robot with a silly clown-mask that reminds one of Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs.

The police get involved, in flashbacks, and the doctor’s wife and daughter have been taken hostage. (Maybe the police are involved in the plot.) Why, then, does the doctor live a “normal” life of sleeping with hookers? Because he is red-blooded heterosexual?  Maybe he isn’t.  It all gets very complicated, and the viewer must play close attention to every detail. Oh, yes, finally he will amputate one of his own feet. I’ll tell you that much.  And, a dead body rises. Actually more than one of them does.

I think people do see this as a magnificent, snazzy exercise in film for film’s sake. This is plot, brutally efficient, every scene holding the moviegoer down wondering what outrage happens next in such sparse (and low budget) settings. What is a bit lacking is characters who really matter. That helps Whannel get away with what otherwise is an implausible, though neatly complicated, plot. I say this in the spirit of someone who works sometimes with literary agents or screenwriting teachers (maybe one will read this) and they tell me—plot, plot… keep the reader or viewer wondering, what next. This film does that. There is one great line near the end, when the doctor says, “My family needs me.” That is why he can depart with one of his gams.

Tyler Mowery offers a YT discussion (July 26, 2022) of the use of flashbacks in Saw. A flashback should always answer a question that would be in the viewer’s mind.

Saw II (2005, Lions Gate Films, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, wr. Bousman and Leigh Whannell) is the sequel of what is becoming the Jigsaw Franchise. In fact, the story follows on the heels of the first film. Jigsaw is played by an Eastwood-looking Tobin Bell, and is dying of cancer, well hooked up to iv’s to deliver his chemotherapy as he masterminds his horrors in some isolated warehouse (in Toronto). The detective (Donnie Wahlberg) is his opponent, as his son Daniel (Erik Knudsen) has been kidnapped at the end of a divorce-related visit. Several other “victims” are trapped in the warehouse, where they are being infused with nerve gas, which Jigsaw claims to be Sarin (from the Tokyo subway attack in 1995). Jigsaw claims that they will all bleed out and die (in a manner reminding one of Ebola virus) if they don’t find the antidote. And, you guessed it, several of the characters die in gruesome ways trying to find it. There will be blood! There is. But there is another connection, that all of the characters were framed for drug crimes by the detective – perhaps a libertarian argument to lift drug laws. The “accidents” are ghastly. One man burns alive in a furnace, starting with his legs and moving up; a girl falls into a pit filled with hypodermic syringes filled with heroine and gets stuck with them; a man gets caught in a machine that slowly slits his wrists. Laura (Beverly Mitchell, whom we recognize as Rev. Lucie from Seventh Heaven – and her damsel-in-distress manner comes through in this movie, too) doesn’t get help in time and really does bleed out. Finally the remainders wind up in the latrine of the first movie, with the same corpses and amputated feet. Daniel is hanging on, and somehow gets fitted with a respirator by the police. We aren’t shown his fate, but we hope that he lives and fully recovers (maybe for Saw III).

The character of Jigsaw deserves more comment. He is something like a mix of Osama bin Laden and the Unabomber (and perhaps Tony Di Mera of Days of our Lives). He is a terrorist. And he has a cause. Namely, the hypocrisy and evil of everything around him. He is dying, and he wants to achieve “meaning” and “immortality” through his sacrificial deeds, pretty much like a typical terrorist. There is some kind of statement here about trying to justify doing bad by the good you think you are leaving.

Saw III (2006, Lions Gate/Twisted Pictures, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, 113 min, R) introduces “the apprentice” and lives up to the name of its second production company, literally. In one scene, “the apprentice” is tested as a man he has not forgiven is twisted limb from limb by gears (rather like those of the Lions Gate trademark). Body parts roll, all right. But the central story is also a twist. This time Jigsaw kidnaps a female surgeon  Lynn (Bahar Soomekh) with the help of another apprentice (there must be more that one team that can win and escape the boardroom here), and sets up one of his traps. “Let us play a game.” Lynn must operate on his brain and save his life, or else her own custom-made “Home Depot” collar will explode. Needless to say, the surgery is graphic, living up to the name of the movie. So is the climax, Whannell wrote the screenplay for this one, but the originality of the franchise is running out like the life that its blood carries. 

Saw IV (2007, Lions Gate/Twisted Pictures, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, 93 min, R) starts in the morgue with the colorless hairy corpse of terrorist Jigsaw being dissected with a circular saw, and there is a tape in his stomach. The FBI gets involved in delving into the last clue, and soon a fibbie is kidnapped and taken through all of the grisly traps left by Jigsaw after his demise. “Feel what I feel.” “See what I see.”  “Become the teacher…” Does all this mean that the sadistic, narcissistic Jigsaw is psychologically feminine (and subjective or unbalanced?) I love the line from one of his deserving “victims”: “I have no soul.” There are plenty of “moral” lessons in this gorefest, which is not very subtle. The first of these films is by far the best.

Saw V (2008, LionsGate / Twisted, dir. David Hackl, 96 min). Jigsaw’s murders continue, even though Jigsaw is supposedly gone. Maybe he isn’t, and maybe he has a successor, another Jeff Dahmer. Maybe Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) and Strahm (Scott Patterson) weren’t what they seem.  The “special effects” get really grotesque. A man is slowly cut in half by a “sling blade” after his hands were crushed off. At the end, an agent gets crushed out of existence, literally. In the middle, five people get tested as to who will sacrifice. There is a lot of Marxist morality talk about people being born privileged and living off of the sacrifices of others. I love the line, “You call it karma, I call it justice!”  

Saw VI (2009, LionsGate, dir. Kevin Geutert). The health care debate gets into this one.  Tobin Bell as Jigsaw is alive and not well.