Saw

Saw is a much better film than the franchise it started, and almost nothing people remember about it is in it.

It was made for about a million dollars in eighteen days and it looks it, which turns out to be the point. The bathroom is a real tiled room, lit green, and the two men in it are played by Cary Elwes and Whannell as people who are frightened rather than resourceful. Most of the running time is two strangers in one location arguing about which of them is lying. That is the film. The traps everyone quotes are flashbacks and police-procedural inserts around the edge of a stage play.

What makes it work is that the rules are legible. Adam is chained to a pipe. Gordon is chained to a pipe. There are two hacksaws that will not cut chain. There is a revolver with one bullet, a corpse holding a tape, and a deadline of six o'clock, after which Gordon's wife and daughter die. Everything that follows is deducible from that list, and the film plays fair with it.

James Wan's first feature is already a style

The whiplash cutting, the colour-timed grime, the ratcheting sound design and the puppet on a tricycle all arrive fully formed here. Wan would spend the next decade building the other half of his career — Insidious and The Conjuring are the same director doing almost the exact opposite, restraint instead of assault — and the two halves are worth watching against each other.

The traps are a moral argument, not a highlight reel

John Kramer is dying and has decided that people who waste their lives should be made to choose. Each device is engineered so that survival is technically possible and requires self-mutilation. The reverse bear trap, the razor-wire maze, the needle pit: all of them are survivable, and that is what makes them obscene rather than merely cruel. The film is clear that Kramer is a monster who believes he is a therapist, and it does not endorse him.

Where it falls down

Elwes's American accent wanders badly and his performance in the final act is pitched several sizes too large. The police subplot with Danny Glover's Detective Tapp is overwritten and exists mainly to withhold information. And the score-and-cut assault in the last two minutes is the one place the film sells its own twist too hard.

For the same engineered-death logic without the moralising, Final Destination; for the same self-mutilation-as-test premise taken to its limit, Martyrs.

The short answer: the corpse on the bathroom floor is not a corpse. Gordon saws off his own foot, shoots Adam with the single bullet, and crawls out to find help. Zep Hindle — the orderly who had been holding Gordon's family — bursts in and is beaten to death by Adam, who finds a tape on his body revealing Zep was a test subject too. Then the body in the middle of the room stands up. It is John Kramer, who has been lying there all day, says "game over", and shuts the door on Adam, leaving him alive and sealed in.

Who is Jigsaw in Saw?

John Kramer, a civil engineer with an inoperable brain tumour, played by Tobin Bell. He is never named in the first film's dialogue as Jigsaw by himself — the nickname comes from the police, after the jigsaw-shaped piece of flesh he removes from those who fail. His stated position is that he has never murdered anybody: he constructs situations and the subject chooses. The film does not let that stand unchallenged, but it does let him say it.

What is the twist at the end of Saw?

That the third body in the room was the killer. Kramer has lain on the bathroom floor since before Adam and Gordon woke, dosed to slow his pulse, holding the tape recorder, able to hear every word they said about him. The twist is purely spatial, which is why it still works: nothing is withheld from the audience except the fact that a man is breathing.

Why does Gordon saw off his own foot?

Because the rule was to kill Adam by six o'clock or his family dies, and he cannot reach Adam. The chain cannot be cut, so he cuts the ankle. The film shows almost none of it. What it shows is Elwes's face and the sound, and then a man dragging himself across tile leaving a long smear.

What happens to Adam at the end of Saw?

He is left alive in the bathroom with the door sealed, chained to the pipe, with the key to his shackle in the drain he has already emptied. Gordon promises to send help and crawls away. Within the first film Adam's fate is a closed door and a scream; the sequels later confirm that no help arrived.

Who is Zep Hindle?

A hospital orderly who appears to be Jigsaw's accomplice, menacing Gordon's wife and daughter and watching the bathroom on a monitor. He is in fact another subject: slow-acting poison in his system, told that the antidote is behind killing Gordon's family by six. The film reveals this in the last two minutes, which retrospectively makes him the most pitiable person in it.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 092 is near the human ceiling — only 4 works score higher. Nothing supernatural happens. A dying man with an engineering degree built everything in the film.

Viscera 082 is high — 94 works score lower. An amputation, a razor-wire maze, a needle pit, a skull trap and a bludgeoning, though the camera is more coy than the reputation suggests.

Tone 018 is bleak — 47 works score lower. One subject survives her trap. The protagonist is sealed in a room to die. The killer wins and is not caught.

Pace 068 is on the shock side, with 89 works slower. The cutting is aggressive and the film never sits still for long, even inside one room.

Era bias 074 reads modern — 66 works score lower. Digital grading, 2004 whip-pans, surveillance monitors and a sound mix built in a laptop era.

Reality anchor 028 is grounded — 16 works score lower. Everything in it is buildable.

On jump scares: several, and most of them are edits rather than events.