From Saw (2004) to Saw 3D (2010), the ingenious, gruesome franchise owned the week-of-Halloween release date. After seven entries, the series seemed to run its course, ceding its calendar spot. But, in horror films, nothing ever stays dead. Here’s a resurrection and a reboot all in one, poised on the knife-edge between delayed last hurrah and the inauguration of a new phase. It’s a paradox that films designed to make audiences wince should become cosy with repetition, but the Saw saga trades in fairytale gothic within its hardboiled mystery frame – the tricycle-trundling puppet, the word games with splatter, Tobin Bell’s whispery sincerity, and fable-like moralities as fallible folk suffer ironic mutilation.
Maintains the Saw knack of being clever as well as nasty.
There’s comfort in the ritual, especially when the makers of individual entries remember the dictate of creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell that the game should always be play fairly. This presents screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger (Sorority Row, Piranha 3D) with a problem – Jigsaw died back in Saw 3. We saw John Kramer’s brain removed and dissected, so how can he rack up a further kill-count? The temptation to update the methodology to take advantage of technical advances since 2004 has been resisted - aside from murky mention of Jigsaw fan sites on the dark web and a Chekhov’s gun bit with a nifty laser scalpel. The horrors here are reassuringly old school: Jigsaw messages still come on mini-cassettes, and the deadly Mouse Trap devices that involve rusty farm implements, buckets repurposed as execution helmets, disassembled motorbikes, razorwire, buzzsaws and a lot of clanking chains.
Voiceprint and DNA evidence points to Jigsaw, but the film brings on a fresh group of investigators – all with their own guilty secrets, and suspicious of each other – running around the city, tripping over spectacularly mangled corpses and literally putting the pieces together. Traumatised war veteran medical examiner Nelson (Matt Passmore), short-fused homicide cop Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie), new-to-this-beat detective Hunt (Clé Bennett) and future fan favourite Ellie the Twisted Assistant M.E. (Hannah Emily Anderson) all alternate between seeming likely next victims and being possible Jigsaw confederates, with almost too much mutual backstory to parse in a single viewing. In a barn, where a particular swine disease is a significant clue, a squabbling, soon-whittled-down quintet of victims play a Grand Guignol version of the Crystal Maze. Laura Vandervoort, Mandela Van Peebles and Paul Braunstein stay out of the losers’ circle longest, though their roles mostly involve screaming, bickering and losing body parts.
Australian directors Michael and Peter Spierig are new to the franchise – but have proven skill with complicated storylines and cartoonish horror satire in Daybreakers and Predestination. On this for-hire gig, they don’t quite match the best of the series, but deliver well above the average middling sequel – and there’s a real satisfaction to the way that all the things you seize on as plotholes or lapses turn out to be clues leading to last-reel big reveals which maintain the Saw knack of being clever as well as nasty.
