Director – Kevin Greutert, Screenplay – Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg, Producers – Mark Burg & Oren Koules, Photography – Nick Matthews, Music – Charlie Clouser, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jon Campfens, Visual Effects – Switch VFX (Supervisor – Beau Parsons), Special Effects Supervisor – Jose ‘Josh’ Martinez, Makeup Effects – Fractured FX (Designer – Justin Raleigh), Production Design – Anthony Stabley. Production Company – Twisted Pictures/A Burg-Koules Production/Galaxy 8 Entertainment/Serendipity Productions.
Cast
Tobin Bell (John Kramer), Shawnee Smith (Amanda Young), Synnøve Macody Lund (Cecilia Pederson), Steven Brand (Parker Sears), Jorge Riseo (Carlos), Renata Vaca (Gabriela), Joshua Okamoto (Diego), Octavio Hinojosa (Mateo), Paulette Hernandez (Valentina), Michael Beach (Henry Kessler), Costas Mandylor (Hoffman)
Plot
John Kramer attends a support group for those undergoing cancer treatment. He later encounters fellow attendee Henry Kessler who tells Kramer how he has undergone a miraculous new treatment combining drugs and surgery that has allowed him to make a full remission. He places Kramer in contact with Cecilia Pederson, who runs a series of trials pioneered by her father. Because they do not have FDA approval, the trials are held in secrecy. Kramer is accepted into their program and flies to Mexico where he is taken to their secret location. He undergoes the operation and makes a recovery. However, when he goes to return a few days later to express his gratitude, he finds the building abandoned and realises that the entire cancer therapy operation is a confidence scam. Some time later, Kramer and his associate Amanda Young abduct Cecilia and all the people associated with the scam and bring them to a warehouse where they are placed inside a series of fiendish traps.
I clearly remember seeing Saw (2004) for the first time – the way the film pushed everything to a gruelling seat-edge tension with an uncompromising grimness made it an electrifying work. It launched James Wan’s career as a director. Along with Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) the following year, it led to a fad that was nicknamed Torture Porn, all featuring scenes of torture pushed to a grisly excess. Saw was quickly followed by a series of sequels under other directors but overseen by Wan and co-witter Leigh Whannell, which consisted of Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009) and Saw 3D (2010).
For whatever reason, the Saw films keep coming back. Every few years there seems an attempt to relaunch the series with Jigsaw (2017) and Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021). I am baffled by the ongoing popularity of the series, especially when Saw X was greeted with some of the best reviews of any of the series – according to Rotter Tomatoes, it now ranks as more popular than the original Saw. It does strange things to my mind to think that people seem to regard Saw X as being a film with soul and heart, while seeming to tune out the fact that the Saw films are a series that focuses on the prolonged torture of people for an audience’s delectation.
Part of it might simply be The Rolling Stones Effect where what starts out as one generation’s outrage and bleeding edge has a couple of decades on become Golden Oldies. You see it with how works like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and the Friday the 13th films, which were dismissed as irredeemable back in their day have grown to a place of fondness through repeats and the people who enjoyed them having grown up.
John Kramer (Tobin Bell) with Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) in the background
Saw X brings back Tobin Bell and places him centre stage, along with other series regulars such as Shawnee Smith and a mid end credits appearance from Costas Mandylor. This entry also brings back Kevin Greutert, previously an editor on all the other films in the series, who graduated to direct Saw VI and Saw 3D, before going on to make the original horror films Jessabelle (2014), Visions (2015) and Jackals (2017).
I found Saw X to be strictly average as the series went. It follows the formula of the other sequels closely without offering anything especially new and different except to place a now 81 year-old Tobin Bell at the centre of the show rather than lurking on the periphery or in recorded postmortem messages. He gets more character development than he has throughout the rest of the series as we see him drawn into a hope for his cancer treatment and then finding he is the victim of a scam, before this turn into a revenge scheme whereupon things are fairly much as per the series usual.
I don’t know about you but I found myself less excited about John Kramer getting his own story than the inherent ridiculousness of some of the set-pieces. In one of the most absurd of these, Joshua Okamoto is placed in a trap and given orders to use an autopsy saw to cut open his skull and remove pieces of his own brain. There is a fantasy sequence near the start where an orderly is placed in a trap that sucks their eyeballs out along plastic tubes. Paulette Hernandez is placed in a device where she must use a gigli saw to cut her own leg off to extract some bone marrow before a wire decapitates her. Renata Vaca is caught in front of radiation lamps (do such actually exist? Wouldn’t they just be regular UV lamps?) and has to smash her own foot and arm to get free. In one of the more ridiculously contrived sequences, Tobin Bell is caught in one of his own traps where buckets of blood are poured into his mouth – “not waterboarding,” Synnøve Macody Lund comments, “it’s blood-boarding.”
Joshua Okamoto in a Jigsaw torture device
This would just be business as usual for the Saw series and perhaps only demonstrates the fact that the series is getting stretched trying to think up new tortures to inflict. On the other hand, what really got me in a big way was the faux morality of the film. In bringing John Kramer out of the shadows and placing him centre stage, the film takes all opportunity for him to morally lecture people on how they choose what happens. Yeah, right. This is a film that has a character who spends his spare time constructing death traps for people. The choices that victims are given are absurd ones – it is not unakin to placing a gun to someone’s head and saying “if you don’t do x then I will shoot you,” and afterwards trying to excuse it as “well they chose the option of being shot by not doing the horrible thing I asked within a given timeframe.” Saw X repeats the refrain about Jigsaw being careful not to actually kill people themselves but letting them choose to do so – unfortunately, that is a piece of sophistry that would never stand up in a court of law. There is kind of the whole abdication of responsibility going on where it was Kramer that chose to put people in the trap and present them with the choices in the first place.
The film frequently has Kramer lecturing people with a sense of moral outrage about how their crimes taking advantage of people in a medical confidence scam is awful, which such a thing certainly is. On the other hand, there is the small matter that torturing and killing people in death traps is surely even worse – at least in the sense that the latter actually kills people horribly and has a much higher jail sentence attached to it than simply stealing people’s money in a confidence scam does. As with much of the series, the film conveniently minimises or excuses its killer’s actions as justified because they are exacting retribution against awful people.
In this respect, the finale of the film where Tobin Bell hands the bag of money to the kid and he, the kid and Shawnee Smith walk off into the literal sunset together the happy substitute family seems particularly nauseous in terms of the film’s faux morality – it’s like the ending of Rob Zombie’s The Devils Rejects (2005), they may slay people together but they are family right?
