Can you believe I’ve never seen this before? Is it good enough to entice me down the Saw franchise rabbit hole?
I watch a lot of current horror, for this blog and otherwise, but that is a relatively recent development. It may seem crazy for someone who does this every year, and is a professed James Wan fan, but I had never even seen a movie in the wildly popular Saw franchise before now. The early nineties were a well-documented wasteland when it comes to horror, so nobody was really paying attention at that time. I was a fan of Scream when it came out in ’96, but the genre resurgence that it spawned always felt so formulaic and sanitized that I never got on board. The mid-2000’s was the era of so-called torture porn, an update to the splatter genre which has a reputation for practically fetishizing the suffering of its victims. That was probably a reaction to those sterile Scream knock-offs, but it was definitely not the type of approach that enticed me to jump back into horror. Yet, here we are some 17 years later, diving into one of the torture porn forefathers, Saw.
Do I really need to describe the plot here? I might be the last person on the planet to watch this movie, and even then I’ve known the broad strokes of story for quite a while. Jigsaw, and Cary Elwes, and morality plays, and reverse bear traps and all that. The question is, what did I think? I think it is a well constructed movie. Perhaps not as well as Wan’s more recent output, but the pacing and the way everything fits together is for sure a cut above Freddy vs. Jason or whatever else was out around that time. I also think it isn’t as gory as I expected. It’s not for the feint of heart, to be sure, but I imagine Eli Roth and his ilk really amped up the carnage as they carried the ball forward from here. Where I feel more ambiguous is around the plotting and the big twists. I basically feel disqualified from having an opinion, because I already knew who Jigsaw was, but… I guess I wasn’t impressed by how it played out. Jigsaw’s motivations are hinted at, but not well explored or thematically consistent with the rest of the movie. How he chooses his victims and decides what to put them through feels inconsistent as well. Take a movie like Seven as a point of comparison. That movie fully explores the motivation behind John Doe’s crime spree, and each macabre set piece helps build to our understanding of Doe’s twisted version of old testament judgement. With Saw, some victims are apparently random, and some he knows from his personal life. Some scenarios involve choosing to hurt yourself to save yourself, some involve choosing to hurt others to save yourself or your family, and in some cases the victim has no choice at all. I would have become more invested if I had a better sense of the why behind it all: Why these specific people, why these specific choices, what is Jigsaw’s philosophy at all?
Beyond my dissatisfaction with the motivations here, this type of movie is simply never going to appeal to me. Even Seven, an objectively better movie in my mind, really isn’t for my cup of tea. For one thing, the pure griminess of the settings is too much for my delicate sensibilities. If you want to eviscerate someone on screen, or chop off their head or whatever, no sweat – just don’t do it in a room with dirt and rust and implied fecal matter everywhere. I can’t even with that shit. Furthermore, I don’t get a ton of mileage out of these elaborately constructed scenarios where the audience is invited to think about what they would do if they were in the grips of the movie’s psychopathic villain. If they were in similar scenarios that organically occurred as they were attempting to run from a killer or something, I think I would have more patience for that type of thing. With your Jigsaw types, my mind always just goes to the fact that the characters don’t actually have any real agency because they are completely at the mercy of their captor.
Anyway, I’m glad that I finally watched Saw, if for no other reason than to close the gap in my genre expertise. I don’t see much reason to persist with the series, however, or to venture on to the ever more depraved Hostel‘s and Human Centipede’s of the world.
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