Adam, a young man, awakes to find himself chained to a pipe in a filthy, tiled washroom. On the other side of the room similarly chained-up is another, Dr. Lawrence Gordon. Between them is a third man who has shot himself, his body lying in a huge pool of blood and with a gun still in one hand and a dictaphone in the other. Neither man can remember how or why they got there, until they find envelopes in their pockets which contain dictaphone tapes. Managing to get the machine from the corpse’s hand, the body remaining out of reach, his tape tells Adam he is there because of his apathy, but a note packed with Lawrence’s tape tells him he must kill Adam by six o’clock, the time now being half past ten, or his daughter Diane and wife Alison will be killed. Adam finds a polaroid picture of Alison and Diane already trussed and gagged, but he does not reveal this to Lawrence. Also finding two saws hidden in the room they try to use them to cut through their chains, but the high-tensile steel will not give. Adam and Lawrence argue about what has happened to them and why, until the doctor remembers being visited by Police some weeks previously. After discovering a string of bizarre, inventive and spectaculaly sadistic tortures, which essentially force the victim to kill themselves, committed by a killer the Police have dubbed ‘Jigsaw’, a team, led by dogged Detective David Tapp, call in Dr. Gordon having found his penlight at one of the murder scenes. They also have a survivor, a woman called Amanda. Amanda awoke to find herself in a large and elaborate steel helmet. A videotape made by Jigsaw, and featuring a bizarre animated mannequin, tells her that the helmet is a ‘reverse bear trap’, and should she not be able to unlock it in time the helmet will activate and rip her head apart. The key is in the stomach of a dead colleague who is laying across the floor of the cell and Amanda has to disembowel him in order to find the key, only to discover as she cuts into him that he is not actually dead, just drugged. Gordon cannot explain Jigsaw’s actions, or how his penlight was found where it was, but Tapp starts to obsessively watch the seized videotape until a clue found on the tape leads them to a warehouse. Tapp and colleague Detective Sing enter to find another man in a hideous torture machine and manage to rescue him, but Jigsaw appears, cloaked and masked, and manages to escape after inflicting a throat wound to Tapp, Sing falling prey to another of Jigsaw’s lethal booby traps. Adam and Lawrence realise that time is running out but Lawrence discovers that Adam is in fact a photographer who was hired to take pictures of him by a mysterious man, the doctor recently having entered into a brief and unconsummated affair. Tensions rise and both start to wonder what part the other has played in their incarceration. But the killer has Diane and Alison hostage and time is running our, and Jigsaw still has several clever and sickeningly twisted tricks to play....
Review:
Shot in a remarkable eighteen days and totally avoiding any self-references or humourous asides, which have made some American horror movies rather toothless,
Saw is quite single-minded in just wanting to scare, or more appropriately, disturb its’ audience, and from the disorienting beginning, where neither audience or protagonists know what is going on, the screenplay by Australian Leigh Whannell, who also plays the unfortunate Adam, dedicates itself to this aim with admirable determination. Our difficulty with a story as complex as
Saw as that any detailed synopsis gives away some of the clever and well-planned twists, of which there are many, even if debut director, and fellow Australian, James Wan has to resort to some visual tricks, such as montage editing, in which a large number of events are replayed in rapid fashion to keep the audience up to speed, while other touches, such as the dramatic change which overcomes one character at the halfway mark, are left as a surprise for the audience to discover themselves. Initially sold to producers on the strength of a promo reel which was the ‘helmet / bear trap / disembowling’ sequence, the film shows ingenuity linked with a genuinely unsettling visual style. The helmet looks ludicrously crude and antediluvian, but we know immediately that it will be devastating, and utterly horrific, if activated.
Saw partially works because after seeing some of Jigsaw’s traps and devices we dread what is coming next, so much so that Wan and Whannell don’t actually have to show very much for the audience to wince. Casting is also effective, with Danny Glover (the
Lethal Weapon series) being at his most grim and dedicated as Detective Tapp, and the scenes between Cary Elwes’ Dr. Gordon and his wife (Monica Potter -
Along Came A Spider) having a terrifically spiky quality as we clearly can see the rifts in their marriage. The script also allows the audience to perhaps guess who the killer actually is, with a large
giallo-style clue, and then takes delight in manipulating that assumption. Wan’s style is impressive, from the dank, stinking washroom, where clues are carefully secreted, to the Jigsaw mannequin, again another trope from Italian
giallo thrillers, and although a couple of touches are irritating - a car chase is shown in speeded-up close-up to disguise the fact that both cars are in a studio rather than on a freeway - his handling of the killer’s traps is compelling. Brilliantly constructed, with author Whannell giving a very good performance as the hostage Adam, not quite as innocent as he first admits,
Saw is viscious and uncompromising horror, and may just be too remorseless for some viewers.