Directed by James Wan
Written by James Wan and Leigh Whannell
Starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes and Danny Glover
Classification: 18A
Rating: * *
Horror movies ought to get right down to the serious business of scaring people, and this one certainly does. The first minute of Saw is nearly as terrifying as the last minute of The Blair Witch Project, which is probably the best thing you can say about this inventive, but ultimately flawed, film.
Breaking with a long-held tradition of the genre, there is no preliminary character development or idyllic establishing scenes before disaster strikes. Saw begins in horrifying darkness and confusion, and gets progressively more laughable (and less frightening) from there.
In the beginning, two men, a doctor and a photographer, wake up to find themselves shackled in a dingy room they have never seen before. On the floor between them is a corpse with a pile of hamburger for a head. In one hand it holds a tape recorder and in the other a handgun. In their pockets the men find tapes addressed to each of them.
On the tapes are instructions from a sinister-voiced stranger on how they can survive "the game" and remain alive. A cool concept, yes. Unfortunately from there things go miserably wrong - not only for the main characters, but for the whole movie.
To say that Saw has plot problems is like saying Michael Jackson is slightly eccentric. The film is so convoluted and full of garbled loose ends you can feel the different script drafts battling it out for attention on screen. This scenario, one suspects, is only exacerbated by the fact that one of the lead actors, Leigh Whannell, was a co-writer on the film. While the script at least hints at originality and imagination, Whannell's emotionally overwrought performance indicates a director on cruise control. It's frustrating too, because deep inside the twisted, stinking entrails of Saw there is a solid little horror movie screaming to get out.
There are impressive qualities to this scrappy low-budget feature, however. The camera work is inventive and the movie appears to have been shot almost entirely on the same location (which possibly explains why the doctor and his family reside in an industrial loft). The filmmakers also manage to effectively build suspense - quite a feat without the aid of a sensible plot.
After drawing us in with the initial setup, Saw abandons its spooky existential beginnings in favour of something that feels more like an off-episode of a Jerry Bruckheimer cop show. Enter Danny Glover as the brooding cop on the trail of a twisted serial killer, nicknamed "Jigsaw" for his habit of leaving puzzle pieces in his victim's flesh. Through a meandering sequence of flashbacks we learn that the doctor has previously been a suspect in the case after one of his possessions was found on the scene. The mysterious Jigsaw, it turns out, likes to torture his victims by trapping them into situations in which they must kill themselves or others in order to escape. (One victim dies attempting to climb through a bale of razor wire to reach an open door.) Unfortunately some of the scenarios are so laughably far-fetched that they slide into comic-book parody.
Meanwhile back in the dingy room, the doctor and the photographer uncover a bunch of disturbing objects, including a two-way mirror, a cellphone, a photograph of the doctor's wife and child bound and gagged and two saws - not strong enough to cut metal, but dandy for human bone. And this is just the first act of this twisted-to-the-point-of-mutilation tale.
Will our protagonists saw off their feet to escape the dingy room and save themselves? Let's just say this: It's a lucky thing I wasn't shackled to my seat in the theatre during this movie. I'd be limping home.