Dir: James Wan. Starring: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Leigh Whannell, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson.
A declaration of bias: If I never, ever see another movie about a serial killer again, I will die a happy man. This is not to say the genre hasn’t yielded its treasures (Psycho, Peeping Tom), but these are like tiny little roses, growing on a huge, towering mountain of crap. Saw, unfortunately, fits into the latter category. A half-baked premise is resolutely flushed down a hysterical, misanthropic and yet somehow boring film. Yes, there’s grizzly deaths; and yes, there’s shocking twists. But frankly, I always end up coming out of these films feeling more like a victim than a spectator, and this is no exception.
Two men, Adam and Lawrence, wake up together in the kind of public toilet you have nightmares about needing to use. Chained to the wall, it seems they are the latest victims of a so-called “Jigsaw Killer”; a - get this - demented psychopath who puts his victims in Rube Goldberg-like contraptions that kill them in a variety of horrible ways. Dotted around the room are a series of clues, but can they figure a way out, and who the killer is, before getting lost in a miasma of flashbacks?
The problem with the high concept film is that you live and die by the concept. Set up a good one, work it through properly and thoroughly, and they can be great fun (Phone Booth, for example), but failure to do so results in disbelief and frequently horror (the bad kind). Saw’s plotting is about as tight as Mary Kate Olsen’s pants,
The main roles of Adam and Lawrence are filled by the film’s writer Leigh Whannell, and Cary Elwes. They’re fine I suppose; appropriate for a Christmas movie given the levels of ham, but then again you don’t watch these films for performances, you watch them to see people get chopped up. And why do we want to see people get chopped up - so much so that we are prepared to forgive anything foisted on us as long as the violence is sufficiently sadistic? I don’t know, but I can’t help feeling that the answers are not particularly savoury. Saw caters to this need superlatively, it must be said. If you’re bored of re-watching Seven, then this film will no doubt tickle your fancy.
But, damn it, I want more than it. The complicity between killer and audience is a fascinating - and disturbing link - and we should, as viewers, confront it whenever we can. It doesn’t have to invalidate the chills - on the contrary. It should magnify them, giving us something that we carry outside the cinema, and into the real world, which is more than can be said of anything in Saw.
D
Patrick Garson.
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