No one told me Saw was camp.
For as long as I can remember, Saw X was talked about like some great-grandaddy of western torture porn, a sort of culture bridge between Hollywood and the extreme violence found in French and East Asian cinema, more notably Hong Kong and Japan, at the time.
I was always under the impression that it was nothing more than a slasher filled with excessive cruelty. So imagine my surprise to learn that it was a soap-operatic melodrama, a police procedural and a gleeful dark comedy, drenched in dated nu-metal aesthetics and all wrapped up with a sloppy, blood red bow. And aside from the lack of a detective subplot, Saw X is a charming continuation of all of that, as well as a love letter to scuzzy, cheapo early 2000s DTV trash.
Saw X opens with John Kramer — the sadistic serial killer known as Jigsaw, who places his victims in death traps — fantasizing about absolutely eviscerating a minimum wage employee for the crime of petty theft. Twenty minutes later and we are presented with extended scenes of Kramer casually relaxing in Mexico, enjoying aged bottles of wine, chatting with locals and experiencing the joys of life, something he clearly values very much. This juxtaposition doesn’t serve to be uncomfortable or to give us some insight into his twisted mind, this is literally just some old guy hanging out.
The sheer commitment Saw makes to ensure Kramer is seen as a sympathetic, honorable man, adhering to a strict moral code, who uses violence for good. The end result isn’t disquieting nor distressing, it’s hilarious.
Saw X is unabashedly itself. Everyone is supposed to be twenty years younger but they all look very old. All of the traps are so implausible that the deaths come across less as shocking depictions of bodily destruction and more like Looney Tunes-esque slapstick punchlines.
Bodies awkwardly flop around once life has left them, the timing of the traps and the violence is so pitch perfect that couldn’t be at least vaguely comedic. At one point several characters use their dead friend’s intestines as rope, and while in almost any other circumstance this would be disturbing, in Saw its rendered darkly comic, borderline self-parody. In fact, one trap contains so much blood, an entire shipping container of goopy bodily fluids, that it would be logistically impossible for Jigsaw to acquire that amount of blood in under a week. Kramer also befriends a random child soccer player and it’s played off as wholesome and deeply mutually respectful despite the fact the two of them only spoke once prior.
Every reveal, no matter how obvious, will always flashback to explain it visually. This comes across less as condescending and more like stylistic flair, a charming nod to the aforementioned opera-isms.
Saw is fun because it allows us, if only for a moment, to pretend that this level of brutality is fun. It’s a complete nonsense world that takes every possible opportunity to have fun, its disturbing at points, but mostly it’s just a silly, charming story full of morally righteous serial killers, incomprehensibly complicated confidence scams, and abrasive orange filters to make sure the audience knows that in fact this does take place in Mexico. Saw X is a movie that bravely asks: What if Jordan Peterson could make very good traps?
