It’s a strange existential feeling to be seated in front of a Saw film once again, a return not just to a franchise but an entire torture porn subgenre. As a screaming woman is forced to cut off her leg and suck out a litre of blood from her fresh wound in order to save her head from being sliced off by serrated wire, one might start wondering the hows and whys of what got us here.
While financial greed is the obvious studio motivator (cheaply made horror still the most reliably profitable genre in Hollywood), it’s curious to ponder why we might want to endure another two hours of stomach-churning gore especially when served on such a musty old platter. The decision to kill the series big bad Jigsaw in Saw III was fitting given the franchise obsession with cattle-prod shock value but it also left the makers in a trap they then struggled to get out of. Ensuing sequels were flashback-heavy, filling in an increasingly convoluted backstory, making each new Saw film feel more like daytime soap opera. In an attempt to swerve away from a timeline that even the most devoted Saw fan would struggle to explain, 2021’s Chris Rock-led Spiral tried to spin the story off into a detective thriller with a different villain but it was an embarrassingly junky disaster, a new low for a series that was already in the gutter.
Two years later, Jigsaw himself, AKA Tobin Bell’s John Kramer, is making an inevitable return in Saw X, brought back to life by an admittedly nifty trick, the film taking place in between the first and second Saw movies. It starts as something more akin to a drama, for better and worse, as Kramer deals with his terminal cancer diagnosis, a mere matter of months left. When he hears about a radical new treatment, he finds a new well of hope, flying to Mexico City buoyed up by the promise of a cure. But once his procedure is over, Kramer discovers that it was all a cruel scam and vows to teach the fraudsters an unforgettable lesson.
It’s an interesting way back into the series and while the latter sequels had become vaguer and often pettier about why subjects were being tested, there’s a much clearer plan here and given how abhorrent the con is, a stronger dramatic pull. The relative lack of horror in the first half (bar a finger-breaking, eye-sucking dream sequence) might be a test for some but it’s strangely more magnetic than the mayhem that comes after, Bell a more careful and studied actor then his most closely associated role has pigeonholed him as. When the traps begin, they’re as gnarly as ever, if not gnarlier, and with very little suspense about the outcome given how they tend to end, we’re reminded of what a Saw film is: a juvenile endurance test. Some of the better sequels, which never came close to matching the original’s twisty charm, found a way to embed them within a diverting enough game, stuffed with deranged twists. But once the trap has been set here, there’s very little meat among all that blood.
Set in the mid-2000s and also shot with the same dated grimy music video aesthetic by director Kevin Greutert, it’s a relic hoping to cash in on nostalgia for the early Saws (for a number of years, Halloween really was dominated by a Saw movie) while also hoping to lure in newer fans who could conceivably enter the world without an exhaustive knowledge of an exhausting universe. While Saw X might try to be more of an actual movie than other entries, it’s then that much more of a distraction when it descends into poorly acted silliness, the final twist requiring so many coincidences that it’s harder to stomach than one of the traps. Jigsaw has always been a rare horror villain obsessed with his own rigid sense of morality and disgusted at the decay around him but flipping between brain-sawing, radiation-burning deaths, and Bell pondering the meaning of life and his impending death gives the film a strange, awkward rhythm, capped by a suitably abrupt ending.
It might be somewhat better than the lowest lows of the franchise but there’s really nothing here to justify why we’re being dragged back to the horrors of the 2000s. We’ve seen enough.
Saw X is in cinemas on 29 September
