Saw (2004)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com December 4, 2023

Spoiler Free Judgement Zone

If you have never seen the Saw movies and haven’t been spoiled, we strongly encourage you to see them before going any further. The script is unique and creative, graphic and tense. The Horror Guys liked this a lot, even after a second and third viewing.

Synopsis

A guy wakes up in the dark, underwater, in a bathtub. He gets out and finds himself chained to a pipe. He hears someone else in the room with him. The lights come on when the other man finds a light switch, and he sees that he’s in some huge industrial bathroom. There’s another man chained up on the other side of the room and a dead man lying on the floor in the center, apparently having shot himself in the head.

The first guy is Adam, and the other guy is Dr. Lawrence Gordon. They don’t recognize the dead guy. Neither of them remembers why they are there. Lawrence has been there longer, and he seems more clear-headed about all this. They notice that the clock on the wall is clean and new.

Adam finds a cassette tape labeled “Play me” in his pocket. Lawrence has one as well. Lawrence also has a key and a bullet. The key doesn’t open either of their locks, but they notice the dead man has a cassette player in his hand.

The tape says that Adam hasn’t lived; he’s just a voyeur. “Are you going to watch yourself die today, Adam, or are you going to do something about it?” Lawrence’s tape says that his goal is to kill Adam, and he has until 6:00 to do it. If he doesn’t kill Adam, then Lawerence’s wife and child will be killed. It gives a hint, “Follow your heart.”

There’s a heart on the filthy toilet, so Adam digs in and finds a pair of hacksaws inside. They furiously work to cut through the chains, but that’s clearly impossible. “He doesn’t want us to cut through our chains; he wants us to cut through our feet.”

We get a flashback about detectives finding a guy in some kind of razor-wire trap that a man tried to crawl through. It was a trap with a cassette tape and a timer. The man bled to death, trying to get out. The police started calling the killer “Jigsaw.” Another guy got burned to death with a complicated task involving a candle. They find a peephole; Jigsaw likes to watch his participants die.

We flashback to Dr. Gordon telling the learners about a patient named John who has inoperable cancer. He gets called in to talk to the detectives about the murders. He’s a suspect in the jigsaw murders– they found his flashlight at one of the murder scenes.

The police have one witness who was a survivor. Her name is Amanda, and she recounts what happened to her. She woke up strapped to a chair with a weird helmet on her head. A weird doll came on the TV, and it told her to play a game. He showed her what the device on her head would do. The key was inside the stomach of her dead cellmate. She cut open the guy, who wasn’t actually dead and took the key out. She got the device off just in time. “He helped me,” she tells the cops.

Back in the big bathroom, Lawrence tells all this to Adam. They soon figure out that they’re being recorded. Lawrence says it’s the perfect setup, and all this has been planned out in great detail. We currently see that Lawrence’s wife and daughter have been captured and tied up. It’s Zep Hindle, one of the workers at the hospital who Lawrence was dismissive of, who did it and is there with them.

We see that the detectives have been after Jigsaw for a long time… They get a lead on Amanda’s Jigsaw tape and follow it to Jigsaw’s lair and workshop. They find a scale model of the bathroom with the two guys and the corpse in it. Then, they find the tricycle doll.

They find a man in a trap, but before they can get the man loose, someone comes up in the elevator. The detectives hide as someone in a cloak comes inside. The cops draw weapons, but Jigsaw activates a trap that’ll kill the man if they don’t release him. As the cops try to figure out the trap, Jigsaw gets away after cutting one in the throat and shooting the other in a booby trap.

Back in the bathroom, Lawrence finds a box with a cell phone, a bullet, and a cigarette inside. The phone only receives calls. Lawrence fakes killing Adam, and the guy watching them doesn’t buy it; he electrifies Adam’s chain, proving that Adam is indeed still alive. Diana, Lawrence’s daughter, calls Lawrence, and she sounds terrified. Alison, Lawrence’s wife, asks about Adam. “Don’t believe Adam’s lies. He knows all about you. He knew you before today.”

Adam admits that he’s been following Lawrence and taking pictures of him. Lawrence has been cheating on Alison, and Adam’s been taking pictures. Detective Tapp, the survivor who got his throat cut, was the guy who paid Adam to follow Lawrence. The now-former detective is obsessed with Lawrence being the killer, and he’s been stalking him for months.

Adam shows Lawrence a picture with Zep in it, and the doctor immediately recognizes him. The clock strikes six; time is up. Zep comes in to kill Diana and Alison. Alison has gotten herself untied, and she gets Zep’s gun. They wrestle, and a shot goes off; a shot that Tapp hears from his surveillance position. Tapp comes in and fights Zep, which leads into a car chase. Zep kills Tapp.

Things get crazy, and Lawrence cuts off his own foot with the saw. He crawls over to the dead man and puts his one bullet into the dead man’s gun and shoots Adam.

The door to the bathroom opens, and Zep walks in. Zep verifies that Adam is dead, but then Adam who was faking it jumps up and beats Zep to death with the toilet tank lid. Lawrence says he’s going for help as he crawls outside, bleeding excessively all the way.

Adam, still chained, finds a cassette in Zep’s pocket that explains to Zep that he has been poisoned and needs to obey for the cure. He was instructed to kill Lawrence’s family and then carry out enforcement of “the rules.” As Adam hears all this, the dead man on the floor gets up, not dead at all, and we see that he’s John, that patient from the hospital. He’s been behind this all along. Adam grabs Zep’s gun to shoot John, but John turns on the electric zapper again to stun him.

Jigsaw says, “Game Over” and locks Adam in the room.

Commentary

I saw this when it first came out, and not since. All I remembered was the stuff in the bathroom, but there’s a lot more to this. Between the Jigsaw flashbacks, the detective stuff, and the affairs, it’s a complicated and clever script.

There’s some gore here, and it’s well done. The traps are unique and interesting, which basically becomes the point of a whole franchise. The ending is a shocker– all along, we were led to believe that Zep was the killer, and he was just an accomplice.

It’s really good.