Saw (2004)
Saw is a bit of a controversial movie, but not in the way one might think. While few would argue the narrative skill on display in that fateful first entry, it’s Saw’s legacy that people tend to take offense to. While Jigsaw’s first game isn’t nearly as gory and sick as his future forays would be, many still point to this movie as the true start of the infamous “torture porn” genre. To me, however, this is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Intense, horrific violence may be the vessel that Saw uses to deliver its narrative, but that’s only part of the equation, which is most evident in its inaugural film.
James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s very first film, Saw sees two men awaken in a a dingy bathroom handcuffed to pipes, with no recollection of how they got here or who put them there. In this room, a corpse lay between them with a bullet in its head and a tape recorder in its clutches. What follows is not the torture games that the series would go on to embody, but rather a slow-burn mystery with some of the best twists and turns this side of The Usual Suspects.
Despite being made on a shoestring budget, Saw pulled two heavy hitters for it’s cast - Danny Glover as obsessed Detective Tapp, and Cary Elwes as the captured Doctor Lawrence Gordon. Starring opposite Elwes in the bathroom is Leigh Whannell himself, playing photographer Adam. Rounding out the cast is Ken Leung as Tapp’s partner Detective Steven Sing, certified badass Dina Meyer as Detective Alison Kerry, and Michael Emerson as one of Gordon’s orderlies, Zepp.
Going much deeper into the plot will automatically lead to spoilers, so I’m gonna warn those who haven’t seen Saw to go watch if you think you’ll ever want to. I don’t think it’s possible to do this movie justice without talking about what it does best: the mystery.
With that said, the constant game of “Who is Jigsaw?” is this movie’s greatest strength. Constant misdirects, with Gordon, Adam, Zepp, and Tapp all harboring just enough secrets to make all of them a suspect, mean that first-time viewers will likely have their own theories by the end of the run. Detective Tapp has been stalking Gordon, Gordon is keeping something from his wife, Zepp seems to be the one in control of the situation in the bathroom, and Adam has kept his REAL profession (private investigative photographer) a secret the entire movie.
So, which one of them is Jigsaw?
None of them. Jigsaw is, in fact, that “corpse” in the middle of the room.
Knowledgeable viewers likely figured this out a few minute before it was revealed, funnily enough. When Gordon finally gives up on the intelligent play and instead saws his leg off to escape, he goes for the gun. His condition, after all, was to kill Adam before a certain time, or else his family would be killed. However, when he picks up the revolver in question and opens the cylinder, there’s no shell casing in it. Revolvers don’t automatically eject their casings.
Even with that revelation, however, Jigsaw’s reveal is only the final in a long string of honestly fantastic misdirects and narrative ambushes. The death of Detective Sing, Amanda Young (played by future Saw veteran Shawnee Smith) telling of her harrowing escape, Jigsaw’s penchant for always giving the players an out, and the slow trickle of information on how these two men ended up in this very bathroom all give the movie a much deeper tale to tell than any of the franchise’s detractors would have you believe.
Do future installments fly off the rails a bit? Sure. However, the beauty of Saw is that it doesn’t need to be only one thing. This movie alone provides some of the franchise’s most interesting and sadistic traps. The Bathroom itself is a complex, multi-part trap in and of itself, and everyone knows the iconic Reverse Bear Trap, first shown here but only truly shown in its full, gruesome glory in Saw 3D. From the start, the franchise played not only with mystery, but with brutality and sadism.
To enjoy these movies, however, isn’t to BE sadistic or gruesome yourself. Movies are fiction, and gore is its own medium. All movies give us guilty pleasures in one way or another. Is watching someone suffer through a gruesome trap any worse than watching someone deal with the loss of a loved one? Is it bad to enjoy Saw, but like something like The Expendables, which has a MUCH higher body count than this series?
To those who find Saw objectionable, I would like to propose this alternative view - Saw is grotesque, there’s no denying that, but such grotesquery is simply theater. In the way that you aren’t reveling in the inevitable death of Bob Jones in My Life, those who watch Saw aren’t simply there because they’re sadistic. They’re there for the tale that sadism tells.
Maybe that’s simply justification, but that’s part of what we do here - no one should make you feel like it’s wrong to enjoy a movie.
No matter how many jaws are detached in it.
