Film review: Saw X

Do you want to play a game? For the 10th time, there’s not much choice. If John Kramer (Jigsaw to you) or his apprentices, or his fanatical copycats, see you fucking around, you’re still in line to find out in the most unpleasant and mortal way. It’s a set-up as successful as throwing Christians to the lions, or public hangings: if you kill them, they will come. And like the recent rethinking of the art of the sequel for the most recent Scream movies – binning off complex, knotty lore to free up new ideas and effectively start a new series in old clothes – this time around Saw plays to the strengths of its central idea in the most horrific and entertaining ways.

Saw X is actually, in the timeline, Saw 1.5, taking place weeks after the events of the original 2004 movie, and before those of the 2005 sequel. Told by his doctor that the cancer in his brain is now so advanced he has just months left to live, John (Jigsaw to you) joins a depressing support group for people in a similar situation. Weeks later, he runs into one of them, a man with stage four pancreatic cancer last time they met, who reveals that he’s in complete remission thanks to the experimental and unlicensed but highly successful work of a Norwegian doctor.

Enquiring into the procedure himself, John is told that, because of big pharma trying to shut down their work because it saves lives rather than creates dependent customers, they’ve had to hightail it from Norway, and their somewhat guerrilla clinic is now in Mexico, where they have a bed ready to operate on him.

Obviously, it’s a massive swindle. And, so, John begins playing a series of “games” with those responsible, offering them a chance to win their lives back and redeem themselves for ripping off dying people who’d paid a fortune for the illusion of hope.

It’s delightfully horrible. Though the quality and quantity of leg-crossing wince quotient is how the Saw series has made it to 10 films over the past two decades, they haven’t been this disgustingly enjoyable for a while. John’s contraptions are, as ever, a designer's dream of inspired, ironic and unpleasant ways to die, with some genuinely funny gallows humour (and not just because the amount of people screaming “Kramer!” is like a deranged episode of Seinfeld). It's an unexpected stitch when, early on, John raises an eyebrow and replies "something like that" when asked if he's a bit like a life coach.

Where the questionable moral maze of many of the Saw films had become a casual means to an end, here, with John coming face to face with his victims (though, as is pointed out, it’s never actually him what does the killings), the questions seethe with the bitterness of his first appearance in the original. This is helped no end by a chilling, layered performance from Tobin Bell that equally balances John as a frail man desperate for a cure and to get his life back, and a heartless, unbending sociopath.

Is he doing a good work “testing” people who have done bad things, or is he just a cruel nut with an excuse for his OTT violence? Does he actually expect any of them, should they escape, to have a conversion along with their PTSD? Is he just as bad as them? And how can he be arsed with such huge projects? With biting and knowing sarcasm, the line, “A lecture on morality – from you?” comes up more than once from more than one angle.

Of course, the fun of Saw isn’t so much about using your brain as seeing those of other people. No problems on that front. There’s also plenty of treats for die-hard Saw-heads, as well as an actual plot twist, and actual stress and tension that stops it just being a 'who's next?' kill-a-thon.

It ain’t pretty, but there’s still plenty of twisted smarts at the centre of the nightmarish set-up.

Game over? Surprisingly, not yet.

Verdict: 4/5

Saw X is released on September 29 via Lionsgate