Not the classic people say it is, but quite good, nonetheless

Rating: 8/10 (12 December 2005)

With the film industry reportedly experiencing major downturns in its intake, and studios contemplating bankruptcy, stagnation is the order of the day in mainstream film. Everything must be toned down in order to appeal to the broadest audience in a curious disregard for the fact that trying to please everyone ends up pleasing no one. Yet Hollywood seemed genuinely surprised that this film, made for a mere 1.2 million US dollars, made back fifteen times its budget and then some on its opening weekend. I can sum it up quite simply. Saw is the first horror film in over a decade to recognise that its audience will almost exclusively be made up of adults, and plays its material accordingly. In case some glass-eyed film executive reads this comment, I cannot stress enough the difference this makes. Saw and its sequel (which I actually watched first) are the first two horror films, at least if you go by production date, that have actually made me horrified since I was in my teens. Perhaps its success will finally mean the end of all the I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer types.
Yet for such a remarkable film, Saw's premise is amazingly simple. Two men wake up in a filthy bathroom, unable to remember how they got there. As one begins to fearfully wonder if one of his kidneys is missing, we learn the other is a surgeon. Slowly, we are filled in on the existence of a bizarre serial killer whose chief delight is in testing how far his victims will go in order to preserve their lives. In so doing, he puts his victims in traps, then very casually explains to them how they can get out. The kicker is that he does not lie to them or hide the salient details from them. He gives them a very good, and very obvious, clue. So obvious, in fact, that our victims often overlook it. In the case of the two men in the bathroom, for example, he leaves them chained to pipes against a wall, with hacksaws to be easily found. The pipes and the chains are too strong to be sawn through in the time it would take them to starve to death. Those who have seen the original Mad Max will know exactly where this puzzle is going (one has to wonder if this was a deliberate reference).
Surprisingly for a film with such a low budget, Saw also contains a few recognisable faces. Danny Glover is the most famous man to appear in Saw, and one has to wonder exactly how such a cheap production secured his services. A Nicholson-like promise of box office percentage comes to mind. Shawnee Smith gives a brief turn as the one victim of Jigsaw to get away, and it is remarkable that for a character whose vocabulary mostly consists of screaming and crying, her performance is quite watchable. Dina Meyer fills in for a scene as a detective, but her role probably amounted to less than a day's work on this set. Her role is considerably expanded in the sequel, which was green-lit the weekend that this film opened. But it is the performance of Tobin Bell, the man who plays Jigsaw, that really hooks the viewer. For the most part, one only hears his voice, and I am not going to spoil the surprise, but suffice to say that you see him throughout most of the film. When it is finally revealed who he is, you will not know whether to laugh, cry, or throw up.
Yet, for all its simple charm, Saw is not without problems. The cameo-like appearances of some actors is somewhat jarring, and plot threads that feature them often seem to go nowhere. Shawnee and Dina get about five minutes of screen time at the most, and some of the scenes they appear in leave one to wonder what happened to this or that plot idea. It is also very difficult to make a film that focuses on two men in a room retain its tension, and the director seems to recognise this, too. There are an awful lot of sequences outside of the room showing the situation of ancillary characters where leaving it to the viewer's imagination would have worked so much better. I suspect that the director realised this in the sequel, too, because aside from moments of the police trying to find where the victims are, the entire film focused instead on seeing the situation through their eyes. So yes, there are some flaws to Saw, and it is not a ten out of ten film, but it comes so much closer than anything else the majors have the nerve to call horror these days.
In all, I gave Saw an eight out of ten. It is truly deserving of the cult and mainstream following has, even if it is not a masterpiece. If Saw and its success does not wake the MPAA up to the fact that people are sick of their modern Hayes Code, then they ought to be cast aside.