I Just Saw

For a long time, the Saw franchise has been a large, bloody gap in my moviegoing experience. They started coming out when I was a teenager and although I was familiar with Roger Ebert’s review of the first, if only for his idea that a thriller could end with the killer getting crushed by a pallet of soup cans before we know who he is and thereby be more intriguing, I think I avoided them because the “torture porn” label that the films were tagged with put me off.

But having recently rewatched a lot of YouTube content on the films, including 2021’s disastrous attempt at a “serious” entry, Spiral, I decided to rent James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s original. Not that anyone needs me to give a plot synopsis for such a horror classic, but to recap:

Two men wake up in a disused toilet block, manacled to pipes. They are Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), a surgeon who’s come to take his upper-middle-class life for granted, and Adam (scriptwriter Whannell), a young man about whose life we learn as the story progresses. Between them is a man who lies unconscious in a pool of blood.

Meanwhile, detectives Tapp (Donald Glover) and Sing (Ken Leung) hunt a serial killer known as Jigsaw, who places his victims inside fiendish traps that force them to endure terrible suffering, and death if they fail to escape. Jigsaw is largely personified by a puppet on a tricycle, reminding me of a similar effect in Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975), while his voice comes from the immortal Tobin Bell, who could have been Freddy Krueger’s long-lost brother.

The film is a mix of Cube (1997) and Seven (1995), combining the heady and conceptual, puzzle box dynamic of the former with the cop thriller-cum-horror suspense of the latter. It’s also a much better giallo – a type of Italian horror film that mixes complex murder mysteries with gore – than any which that genre’s actual maestro Argento was making around this time.

The negatives that I can pick from Saw are fairly minor. This is the type of thriller that’s really just an artificial plot machine, so things like character and motivation exist solely to the degree that they’re needed to move the plot forwards. In this respect, it’s unlike Seven, which developed its characters and themes to a higher level so that its world felt like a real place.

Donald Glover is far and away the best actor in the piece, his quietly intense performance adding more gravitas to his role than it has in the writing. Everyone else is fine, although Cary Elwes is better in the quieter scenes than he is in the more extreme. When he’s required to scream and shout and make desperate threats his acting can tip over into parody.

The film at its core is a surprisingly effective noir mystery told in the manner of a horror story. Its low-budget feel is genuinely charming and makes it a neat time capsule of early 2000s horror. All through the film I was admiring the skill with which Wan and Whannell weave an entire tale out of such raw materials.

This isn’t a film with sets so much as very tight spaces that cost little to film in, hence why the framing is so narrow and reliant on atmosphere to evoke a larger setting than what’s available. The police station, for example, is just a couple of rooms with glass panelling across walls. A hospital consists of a patient’s room and an office, and so on.

There are very few exterior shots and even those tend to be jerry-rigged out of editing tricks, such as when quick-cutting is used to suggest two cars racing through fog. The editor was Kevin Greutert, who edited all of the Saw films besides Spiral and is in some ways the soul of a franchise that would be a lot more generic without his involvement. (As evidenced by Spiral, which looks completely soulless.)

Saw itself is like a puzzle box, with a clockwork plot as fiendish as one of its traps. Its story is all artifice, an oiled machine set up to jerk its archetypal characters around like marionettes. Its sequels would rip the box apart and rearrange its innards until it was just loose springs, cogs, oil, and bits of puppet strewn about. But the original remains intact, shining like a bear trap in an empty room…