Saw (2004)
Posted on January 13, 2006
Filed Under Creepy stuff, Serial killers, Slashers
Saw was the surprise horror hit of 2004, seemingly coming out of nowhere to gross over $55 million - that’s fifty five times its meagre $1 million budget. Given the other genre smashes of the year were the limp remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead, it was proof that there was still a public appetite for inventive, low-budget chills. Whilst Saw doesn’t offer much in the way of ideas for the audience to mull over, it’s an extremely well put-together series of scares and mind-bending plot twists that manage to sustain a sense of edge of the seat tension without resorting to cliche.
The film plays out like a particularly messed-up episode of Lost. Adam (scriptwriter Leigh Whannell) awakes to find himself chained to a pipe in a grimy bathroom, whilst opposite, Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) finds himself in the same situation. Between them lies a dead body clutching a tape recorder. Via a tape he finds in his back pocket, Lawrence is told that unless he kills Adam, his wife and daughter will be killed. They are the latest victims of the Jigsaw Killer, whose particularly twisted mind games seem to test their victims’ devotion to life. As Lawrence and Adam’s stories are told in flashback, Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover) is on the killer’s trail…
Saw has been accused of being a simplified re-hash of David Fincher’s seminal Se7en, and on the surface it’s not hard to see why: both films feature a battle-scarred black cop on the trail of a killer whose atrocities spell out perverse moral lessons. But whilst the killer’s motivation lay at the heart of Se7en, in Saw it’s something of a red herring. In fact, it’s probably the movie’s most underdeveloped strand; Whannell suggests that his earlier killings form a twisted ‘preaching’, but no fully satisfactory explanation is given for Lawrence or Adam’s predicament. Saw suffers from a handful of similar leaps of logic, but it’s to the movie’s credit that these didn’t really bother me until after the final credits had rolled. The killer’s motivation isn’t really relevant, but his ingenuity is, and a series of dizzying twists in the plot (including one particularly crushing development right at the end) means the film rattles along at a breakneck pace whilst managing to conjure a real sense of suspence. Director James Wan uses every editing trick in the book to sustain interest in what is essentially a movie about two men sitting in a dirty bathroom, and whilst the industrial music and fast-cutting may seem like Wan is pandering to viewers with ADD, he uses enough geniune invention to raise his direction above the level of mere eye candy.
The film’s acting has been criticised elsewhere, but I was pleasantly surprised by Cary Elwes’ turn as Lawrence, although this may have something to do with only having previously seen him in Hot Shots. He gives a believable performance as the starchy but pragmatic doctor forced to reason his way out of a horrible situation. None of the other actors particularly stand out, but they provide competent support. Saw doesn’t really offer much to tax the grey matter, but it’s still a smart and highly enjoyable effort that delivers more twists and scares than pretty much any other recent horror film I’ve seen. Its box office success is immensely encouraging for the genre’s future, and I hope it opens the door for more independent film makers to delivers accessible yet distinctive shockers of this calibre.
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