Review: Saw X (2023)

Saw X (2023)

Rated R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, language and some drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

For some strange reason, Saw X, the tenth film in the venerable Saw franchise, is being marketed as a nostalgic throwback, even though the franchise has never really gone anywhere. Yes, it's been close to twenty years since the original film... but I remember six years ago when Jigsaw was marketed as the franchise's grand return to theaters after a long period of dormancy. Hell, we got a new Saw movie just two years ago, in the form of Spiral: From the Book of Saw. It wasn't a particularly good movie, and most people missed it because it came out during COVID, but it was a theatrically released Saw movie. What makes this different, I feel, is that it's not only the tenth Saw movie, a genuine milestone that very few horror franchises reach, but that, more than Jigsaw or Spiral, it brings the franchise back to the "classic" period of the franchise in the 2000s. Jigsaw was a soft reboot with only one returning character, the original Jigsaw killer John Kramer himself in one scene towards the end (not counting his voice on the tapes), and Spiral was a spinoff with an entirely new cast. Saw X, meanwhile, takes place around the time of the second and third films, it's once again a numbered sequel after the last two films went by just Jigsaw and Spiral, and most importantly, it not only brings back Tobin Bell as Kramer once more and gives him what's probably his biggest on-screen role in the series to date, it also brings back Shawnee Smith as his first and arguably most prominent apprentice Amanda Young.

And most importantly, it's a return to form for a series that's had a lot of ups and downs throughout its long life. While it acknowledges the sprawling mytharc of the prior films, it puts nearly its entire focus on its central, standalone plot, which serves up one of the series' biggest, most deserving, and most inadvertently timely assholes as its villain. It takes what had been a growing, questionable subtext throughout the series, that of John being less a vile serial killer villain than a righteous vigilante anti-hero, and comes closer than ever to making it outright text, complete with a triumphant hero shot of him and Amanda at the end (given that this is an interquel set before the second film, it's no spoiler to say they make it out alive) and the main criticism of his philosophy being voiced by somebody even worse than he is -- but the film still makes it work, in the same manner that vigilante movies and Godzilla movies work, by setting this monster up against even bigger monsters. It's exactly as gory as you'd expect from a Saw sequel, but it was also quite an in-depth character study of John, being set as it is during one of the darkest moments of his life and spending its whole first act on his attempts to escape his own looming fate, with the obligatory opening death trap turning out to be purely a product of his imagination. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it's probably the best in the franchise since the sixth, or even the first three.

The film takes place at an unspecified point between the first and second films, with John Kramer still clinging to some measure of hope that he can beat the brain cancer that's slowly killing him -- and finding it in Finn Pederson, a controversial Norwegian doctor who claims to have developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that Big Pharma wants to suppress in order to protect their profits. John flies down to Mexico to meet Finn's daughter Cecilia, running a clinic outside Mexico City where she carries out the treatment her father developed. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long before John realizes that Cecilia sold him snake oil, and that there's a good reason why she and her father were run out of Norway. Finding that all of her and her father's previous patients ultimately died of their illness anyway, that the "operating room" he was in was a Potemkin village, and that the "doctors" and "nurses" who assisted Cecilia were actually random hoodlums who she hired off the street to make her scam look more legit, John takes his revenge in typical Jigsaw fashion -- and calls his apprentice and intended successor Amanda Young down to Mexico to help him out.

I will admit that, after COVID, there was a measure of catharsis in the idea of the main target of a Jigsaw trap being a phony doctor who steals desperate people's money and cries persecution from Big Pharma when the authorities start investigating her crimes. (The basic plot outline was actually written before COVID, which makes it even more amusing.) That said, Cecilia Pederson was still a great villain even separate from the real-life subtext. I liked how the film initially presented her as a warm contrast to John, somebody who also uses controversial methods to improve people's lives but does so by healing their illnesses with suppressed medical treatments instead of John's tough love approach to straighten out people who are destroying themselves. It doesn't take long, however, before she's revealed as an even worse person than John, somebody whose altruistic motives are all a pose to separate people from their money. She'd probably disagree, though, perhaps best evidenced when she directly calls out John's hypocrisy in thinking he's doing any good in the world versus her flatly admitting that she's motivated by naked greed and that any appearance otherwise is part of her con, probably the closest the series has come in a long while to seriously interrogating the warped morals that make these movies so entertaining but also kind of awkward. Synnøve Macody Lund plays both sides of the character well, coming off as a comforting presence in the first half of the film but rapidly shedding that and turning into a cold, calculating survivor once John catches up to her. She deserves everything she gets in this movie and then some.

That said, this is really John's movie more than any other, giving Tobin Bell more screen time than he's ever had before as not a shadowy villain orchestrating the mayhem from the cover of darkness but a central character who's directly involved in it on the ground. Much of the first half of the movie is a slow burn that builds up to the mayhem to come, a drama about John traveling to Mexico in search of hope only for it to be cruelly taken away from him when he realizes it was all a lie. Bell is a legitimately captivating presence on screen, his typically creepy, ominous tone often cracking at times to reveal genuine anger at the people who've screwed over not just him but dozens of others to make money, as well as compassion for those who did him no wrong, or at least passed his tests. Right beside him is Shawnee Smith as his apprentice Amanda, and while her wig here is awful, she otherwise felt like she was right back at home in the role, no worse for wear. She does the duo's dirty work both literally and figuratively, in the sense of being the "muscle" for the ailing John and in her belief that some of their victims are beyond redemption and ought to be just tortured to death to make examples of them. She's the dark side of John's philosophy, the film showing that she's already on the downward spiral of cold-blooded vigilante vengeance that would culminate in the third film. Together, they made a such a great pairing that it felt like a waste to only have one movie before this, the third, showing them working together like this. It did feel kind of awkward to outright root for them, given who they are and what they're doing, but again, watching the scum of the earth get slaughtered to the roar of the crowd is kind of the appeal of a lot of "body count" horror movies, and a lot of the great '80s slasher franchises, while never going so far as to make their killers into outright anti-heroes like this movie does, still made them compelling, even charismatic presences and often flagrantly sided with them over their victims.

And if you want blood, you've got it. When you're heading out to see the tenth Saw movie, there are certain things you expect, above all else some absolute geysers of gore. And this movie delivers eyes getting sucked out of sockets, bones big and small getting broken, legs getting sawed off (the series' old namesake classic), brains getting cut into, flesh being burned, and more. The body count may be lower than some of the series' greatest hits, but the special effects remain up to par with all of them. There are moments of creeping tension earlier in the film as the victims are stalked and kidnapped, but at this point, the series has its formula down to a science, and it knows how to get big cheers and thrills out of people mutilating themselves to avoid an even worse fate. The plot, too, is one of the most straightforward in the series, keeping the references to the broader Saw mythos limited to Easter eggs and focusing chiefly on John's revenge against Cecilia and her associates rather than turning into the kind of violent soap opera that otherwise runs through the franchise. There isn't much here that reinvents the wheel, but it still serves up some pretty classic 2000s-style torture porn that delivers the goods.

The Bottom Line

By putting more focus on its characters, in particular fleshing out John Kramer and making him almost a dark hero of sorts, Saw X proves that, even after this many sequels, the franchise still knows how to tell a compelling story without forgetting the grit and gristle that it does better than few other mainstream movies. It's a very entertaining way to kick off the spooky season.