Saw
(2004)
review by Suspiriorium

Two men awake in a dilapidated bathroom, unsure how they got there. Each man is chained by the ankle to opposite ends of the room. In the middle there lies a bloodied corpse with a gun in one hand & a tape recorder in the other. Searching in their pockets, they discover they each have a tape marked “play me”.

I must confess to becoming rather disillusioned with the Hollywood serial killer film. Whilst the peaks of the genre like Silence of the Lambs & Se7en remain eminently watchable, the glut of imitators pursue a depressingly familiar course. There’s only so many Kiss the Girls & Bone Collector’s you can watch before the thought of watching Taking Lives or Twisted becomes about as appealing as watching Legally Blonde 2. Be thankful then for Saw, a fiercely aggressive indie that shows the big budget boys how to do a serial killer movie properly. It may not quite be perfect, but there’s an intelligent & quite nasty sense of ingenuity running through the film to make it easily one of the most satisfying of the year.
Initially starting out as a low-budget high-concept piece in the Cube mould, as the film progresses it maps out a surprisingly complex web of flashbacks packed with red herrings, plot twists & fiendishly gruesome set-ups forcing its characters into making extremely difficult decisions if they wish to survive to the end. This really is one film about which you should endeavour to know as little as possible before you go in, so as to preserve its deliciously disturbing surprises.

Working from a script by Leigh Whannell (who plays the younger of the two chained men), debut director James Wan makes the most of the horrible situations, wringing maximum amount of suspense out of proceedings. He is aided by some wonderfully dingy production design, & photography that is both gritty & grungy & yet sometimes very beautiful. The score adds nicely to the tension, although being written by two members of Nine Inch Nails, it’s heavy industrial metal stylisation in the most exciting scenes sometimes lean towards the overblown & obvious. Performances are generally very good, particularly Whannell & Glover as the discharged cop desperate to find the killer, although whilst generally very good Elwes suffers from a couple of slightly wooden moments.

There are a couple of other relatively minor problems here though. The whole film is extremely contrived, & while I didn’t mind this for the most part there are a couple of moments at the climax where certain characters’ behave in a certain way more because the plot demands it than for a plausible motivation. There are also a couple of moments when Wan plays the style card too hard with quick cuts & spinning cameras overplaying for effect when a quieter moment would have been more effective. On the plus side, it currently seems to be very cool to litter genre movies with references to classics, & aside from the fiendish Evil Dead Traps you will also likely spot nods to Black Christmas, Profondo Rosso, City of the Living Dead, Tenebre & others. In this case however, I really enjoyed these sly nods & felt they worked very well within the concept of the film & enhanced rather than detracted from the experience.

This review is based upon the UK theatrical release, which to the best of my knowledge is the full-length version. Sadly Lions Gate are cutting for an R-rating in the US (risking one NC-17 with Haute Tension is enough), although there are only really a couple of choice moments of gore. Frequently, the film keeps the most horrendous images just off the edge of the screen relying on the audiences’ imagination & some choice crunchy sound effects to get what would arguably be a more disturbing effect than slapping the Fulci gore around. This adds up to make the film a genuinely creepy, tense & nightmarish experience right from the intriguing opening to remarkably bleak conclusion. As much as you see & hear, there’s a constant threat of events more horrendous than you can conceive around any given corner. Refusing to cop out despite its intricate plot twists, Saw is the kind of fresh, exciting & involving movie that reminds me why I started writing for this site in the first place. It’s a film that no genre fan should miss.