Creepy thriller which has you second-guessing everything

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2005)

Saw's trailers and teasers are full of misleading clips which make you believe that the story is about a maniacal killer who has a grouping of puzzles that the person captive must solve in order to stay alive. What the trailers do not tell you is the depth of emotion and psychosis that was put into the movie itself that has you actually caring about those possible victims.
This film was a hair-raising thriller to the worst degree as you see characters trying to figure out how they are going to get out of a dire struggle for life and more time to figure out their future after the day that they get put into such a situation. The shots were very stylish and moody as anything released before this film. There has never been a horror/thriller quite like this before, which is amazing because so many thrillers released within the last 5 years have either copied each other in certain shots or stylistics, or they steal from the problems of the main villain of other films. This does neither and it's amazing.
The music was on par with movies like 8mm and Se7en and that sort of heavy metal meets unknowing timpani sets of action movies' past. The film was very stylistic, but given the time that it was shot in (18 days!), the film seems better directed knowing that they took less time to do it in. The film was written and directed by the same man (with help from another guy writing), and hopefully we'll see more from the director. The whole puppet thing was odd, and it didn't need to be in this film for anything else than a visual creepy thing, and later on, it served a purpose to tell detectives where the murderer was, but still... I was kind of angry about the fact that there was no in-depth behind-the-scenes on the DVD, and instead it was replaced by an extra-long "making-of" of a horrible Fear Factory video. (the video is basically the movie, but more green-screens and cheesy effects including a fake heart, a model who couldn't act, and a lead singer who couldn't have cared less about him being in the video) So I gave this film 7/10 stars. I also would've casted a different doctor actor (from the beginning, he seems to be overacting a lot of the time). But Danny Glover was amazing and a class-act amongst a lot of no-name actors in the States (I might've seen the doctor actor before, but he looks like every other straight-character-actor). But those points are the only I could find wrong with this film. It is a definite buy if you have a chance because of everything I said up above.