Saw (2004)

 

Yes, the film that started a franchise that just keeps on running and running. The quality of the sequels wildly fluctuates between entertaining and utter shite, but there's little sense in denying that this first low key horrorfilm delivers the goods in surprising fashion. Heck, it even has an ending stinger that literally no one saw (get it?) coming. Nowadays, it might be easy to dismiss the franchise, but this is still one chilling flick.

With little fanfare, two men wake up in a dilapidated bathroom, both chained to pipes on the wall. Why and how they got there is a mystery. In between them, there is a corpse of a man who shot himself through the head and he's holding a tape recorder. Through little bits of information and clues that they discover through some audio and some items hidden somewhere in the bathroom, they start to realise that something is terribly off. For one, one of the men is a surgeon who doesn't pay as much attention to his family as he should (including having an affair), whereas the other is a sleazy photographer sent to take compromising pictures of the surgeon. 

It turns out the wife and daughter of the surgeon are held hostage and he only has a few hours in which he is supposed to kill the photographer, or his family will die. 

Not only that, but there is a disgraced police officer hot on the trail of the so-called Jigsaw Killer, someone who not literally kills people, but leaves them in elaborate and lethal traps with little time to escape. The officer thinks the surgeon might be involved, but it turns out that the plot runs deeper than anyone imagined... 

This film does a very decent job of keeping the audience in suspence about what is going on and is very sparingly dropping snippets on information along the way. See, you don't have to do oodles of exposition to stay enthralled. Thanks to the mostly claustrophobic location (there are some scenes outside of the bathroom, but not a whole lot) you get this uneasy feeling and the editing and pacing does a good job of making everyone feel that time is, indeed, of the essence. 

The actors are also pretty good. Cary Elwes does a decent turn as the surgeon and Leigh Wannell is pretty okay as the photographer, even though he is the one that sometimes goes a little overboard. Danny Glover plays the fanatical police officer, but he doesn't have that much to do and this film didn't really need his inclusion anyway. I get that they wanted to have a big name attached and all that, but really: anyone could have played that minor part and it would still have been absolutely fine. 

And in spite of the sequels penchant for blood, guts and gore and scenes of pure torture, this one is way more subdued and suggestive, which of course makes it all the more horrifying as our brain fills in the gruesome details. This is always better than just showing everything for shock value only. True, gore has its merits, but sometimes, subtlety is the best course of action.