Mortifyingly Claustrophobic Splatter Film

Rating: 9/10 (6 November 2008)

When I first saw this ideal sleeper hit, I was absolutely terrified. It wasn't that it was violent or Gothic. Rather, it was that it is claustrophobic even when the story reaches beyond its main setting, an unsavory dungeon warehouse bathroom. Saw never comes up for a breath of pleasant fresh air, even by the mortifying end, an end that will make even the most adventurous or free-flowing of viewers become at least scared of the dark. This was the most scared I had ever been by a movie from the horror genre. I loved it for its nonstop bearhug of creepiness.
The film opens as Adam wakes up in a bathtub full of water, getting out of the bathtub and screaming for help, then Dr. Lawrence Gordon tells him that screaming for help is no good because he tried it already, meaning he was awake some time before Adam. How could Adam have been submerged water for so long without drowning? No matter. Bearhug of creepiness. Now, in the neglected industrial bathroom, Adam and Gordon are chained by their ankles to pipes at opposite corners. In the room between them is a dead body with a revolver and a micro cassette recorder loosely in grip. Lawrence and Adam each find tapes in their pockets labeled "Play Me." According to the disguised voice on the tape, Adam has to escape the bathroom, while Lawrence must kill Adam before six o'clock, or his wife and daughter will be killed and he will be deserted to die captive in this room. This is the irresistible set up for Saw, one so intelligently designed to inject us with great tension in the first single minute that I dread the idea of ever seeing it in the quintessential modern-day American horror film theatrical experience, surrounded by a nearly sold-out rowdy, shouting, giggling, starting and restless audience. It demands our intention.
Its concept, which is unraveled which the crisp enough pace to ensure that we are enduring the suspense, is one which does not just play on our irrational human fears that usually result in horror films like Jaws, Night of the Living Dead or Rosemary's Baby. It connects with true misery, helplessness and paranoia to its terrors. For better or for worse, this is a real breakthrough in the realm of debuts among young fanboy filmmakers. And you can tell that James Wan has some growing up to do: His movie inserts, flashes back, speeds up and machine gun-edits too much. Wan could have intensified the horrific atmosphere by letting an image speak for itself without screaming at us that it's an intense moment.
But the talent, ambition and spirit behind his work, not to mention the wit and flair of Australian screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who stars as the panicked Adam, is highly infectious. With the surfacing of the "torture porn" genre in the past decade, the Saw film series, together with similarly relentless shockers like Eli Roth's Hostel and Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, is often discerned as an instance of the frequency of manipulatively attractive and stylized graphic violence and gore in contemporary horror films. Nonetheless, Saw is perhaps the very least exploitative of them all, especially Hostel and The Devil's Rejects.
Splatter pictures, owing to the wear and tear of special effects and extreme amounts of blood and guts, have a propensity for exhibiting an explicit attraction to the weakness of the body and the sensationalism of its maiming. Saw is, yes, an inordinately violent movie. The word might actually be sadistic. However, Saw's gore and brutality come inherently from its concept, which is designed to horrify us.
Saw may be a great horror film, but it is not quite a great film. By and large, its cast gives B- movie performances. There are suspense sequences in which a character makes a glaringly unrealistic choice. Wan needs to mature into a more confident filmmaker with a better understanding of the language of editing. In spite of these things, it's the kind of horror movie of which we need to see more: A horror movie that is as smart as you.