THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
If she had stopped at Saw 6 (2009), the franchise would have said with this film name the last word of its philosophy: the human barbecue, the dismemberment of bodily integrity, the enjoyment of both showing and seeing the infliction of suffering, in a word the spectacle of sadism in the infinite entrenchments of its barbarity, even if it is under fictional license. It did not happen. It has now been twenty years since the saga raged, in the wake of James Wan’s first feature film (Saw2004) which laid the foundations of this subgenre of the nicely titled horror film torture porn. Governed by a principle which had the virtue of simplicity – a series of scenes of various and varied tortures inflicted by a psychopath on a small group that he trapped –, success was immediately achieved, soon raising the saga to horror film nirvana.
Let’s recall the principle: John Kramer, alias Jigsaw, is suffering from a fatal brain tumor, and is busy, during the time he has left to live, in straightening out sinners through trials that leave them in truth little chance of getting out. A manner of puritanism, in short, which inflicts on its victims abuses much more terrifying than the faults which it attributes to them. Kramer ends up dying in the third part, but other protagonists continue the tradition. This tenth part, however, takes us back to the beginning of the saga, somewhere between the first and second films, by bringing back two of its inaugural characters, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) and Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), one of its first victims who, delighted with the experience, became his disciple.
It is in Mexico, under the premonitory invocation of the Aztec gods, that the festivities of this tenth opus will take place. Kramer arrives there after meeting one of the members of his support group in the street – a “stage 4 pancreatic cancer” – who miraculously seems to be in total remission and gives him the contact details of a Norwegian doctor, Doctor Pederson, who has found a revolutionary treatment which forces him into hiding, given the danger he poses to pharmaceutical laboratories. Supported by the doctor’s daughter, surrounded by the best local professionals, Kramer is operated on in a rich hacienda, before discovering that the whole affair is a scam on patients in distress.
Contemporary monstrosity
This is obviously where the festivities begin: Kramer, assisted by Amanda, sequesters the pseudo-medical team who cheated him and inflicts on him the usual “game”, consisting of deadly mechanisms which constrain, within a period of time very limited, victims to severely self-harm if they want to escape. On today’s menu: legs cut with a saw, ankles exploded with a mallet, flesh incised with a razor, skull opened, cerebellum punctured, intestines eviscerated, faces burned with radiation, heads severed. Greenish atmosphere, disused industrial premises, steel instruments. Occasionally, the tricks remind us of the sardonic joke of the grand guignol, but overall the uneasiness bogs down.
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