'Saw' Revisited

Back in 2004, I sat stone-faced as a Midnight Madness audience was whipped into a frenzy over the first 'Saw.' Was I missing something?

In the earlier stretch of my 20-year stint covering the Toronto International Film Festival, before age and late-night filing obligations got in the way, I would try to make it out to as many Midnight Madness screenings as possible. It was (and, by all accounts, remains) an intoxicating atmosphere, with audiences jammed into large venues—once the glorious Uptown 1, now the dreaded Ryerson—and whipped into a frenzy by the introduction, at least back when Colin Geddes was programming the section. Every year, there would be a couple of films that felt like red meat tossed to the howling wolves, hyper-energetic and gory pieces of stylized schlock that would set the place whooping like the audience of The Arsenio Hall Show. (Sorry, you’re not getting a more timely analogy from me here.) As a critic sitting stone-faced through the likes of, say, Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno while the roars swelled for every cannibalistic nibble, there could be a sense of cognitive dissonance. Was the movie fun-bad or bad-bad (or good-good), and if I get drunk on witching-hour mania, would I have a hangover in the morning? 

James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw was perhaps the most red-meat Midnight Madness experience I ever had at the festival. It had arrived as something of a buzz magnet, having premiered to similar enthusiasm in the midnight section of Sundance earlier in the year and was now poised for a nationwide release over Halloween weekend the following month. As horror hooks go, Saw was “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with the riff hitting hard from the opening chord: Two strangers chained to pipes on opposite sides of a dilapidated, fluorescent-lit bathroom with a dead body planted face-down in a pool of blood between them. Who are they? How did they get there? Who’s responsible for putting them in this spot? What’s the deal with the micro-cassette recorder and the gun in the dead man’s hands? This audience was keenly interested in having those questions (and the many more that follow) answered. And they were especially aroused by a bag containing two hacksaws, which were not strong enough to break through heavy chains and locks, but could certainly cut through soft tissue. 

I was unmoved. 

Saw struck me as dark, gross, and gimmicky, and to the extent that I was laughing along that night, it was at Cary Elwes’ stilted distress or the deranged pile-on of twists built into its plotting. The purity of that two-guys-in-a-room setting had been lost by the expansive web of flashbacks and crosscuts around it—which had turned me against Phone Booth, too—and the Jigsaw Killer struck me as a cross between the grisly morality of Seven and Joe Rogan putting C-list celebrities through the paces on Fear Factor. (Hey, that reference is timely again!) I wrote a scathing review in The A.V. Club, and all the Saw movies that followed, mucking up Halloween year after year after year, seemed to bear out my skepticism. The only thing that gave me pause is that Wan and Whannell, together and apart, would turn out to be wildly talented and entertaining filmmakers. They would start the Insidious franchise. Wan would direct The Conjuring, Malignant, and solid entries in the Fast & Furious and Aquaman movies. And Whannell has emerged as one of the best genre directors in Hollywood with Upgrade and The Invisible Man. 

Did I miss something? Were the Midnight Madness wolves right to howl that night nearly 20 years ago? 

This week, for the first time since that night, I watched Saw again in the cold light of day, isolated from any noise outside my ancient, snoring pug. And it turns out that I did, in fact, miss something. Many of the old adjectives still apply: It’s still dark and gimmicky and over-cranked on a plotting and stylistic level, and the variability of the performances remain an issue, though they’re better than I remembered and can be chalked up to shooting on a tiny budget and an 18-day schedule. The Seven comparison holds, too, as Jigsaw bitterly puts his victims through razor-wire cages and “reverse bear traps” for personal missteps or for not appreciating their lives more. But exploitation cinema—or Ozploitation cinema, given Wan and Whannell’s roots as film-school brats in Melbourne, Australia—isn’t about originality, but impact. Saw was their chance to make a first impression, and they laid the reverse bear trap accordingly. 

The main thing I missed was that the sequels to Saw reinforced an impression of the original that wasn’t quite correct. While we see the many ways Jigsaw has engineered disgusting trials for a range of different characters, the sequels put these modes of mechanized death front and center, to where the main attraction was to witness new, drearily baroque death traps. That’s not really the thrust of Saw, which rushes through these sequences—quite literally in one case, when Wan uses fast-motion to yadda-yadda through the razor wire cage—and keeps coming back to the dilemma facing the two men, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Elwes) and Adam (Whannell). Saw is the only truly suspenseful film in the franchise, because the questions facing Gordon and Adam from the first scene are the driving force. 

Back in 2010, I did a lengthy interview with Whannell and Wan about Saw—they knew I disliked the film and were quite magnanimous about it anyway—and asked them about the “torture-porn” criticism that was attached to the movies. Looking back, their response affirmed my impression of Saw this time around: 

Wan: With the first Saw film, we didn’t set out to make a torture movie. We had a really short segment that focused on that. But even then, it was shot in such a way where the focus wasn’t really on torture, but it was more focused on the overall mystery. The first movie played out like a mystery thriller.

Whannell: It wasn’t like we took the torture sequence in Marathon Man or Reservoir Dogs and stretched it to the entire film. We didn’t do that. We only had it in a short segment, and the rest of the movie was just this huge mystery. It’s almost like a whodunit, right? But, like I said and as Leigh pointed out, it wasn’t until the sequels that it became more and more about [torture].

In the interview, Wan also talks about the two of them taking inspiration from the DIY ambitions of Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez, and Saw has the calling-card quality of a film that might deliver them to a place beyond their dead-end jobs in the industry. It makes sense to look at Saw as their El Mariachi, in that it asserts their resourcefulness and dexterity, and seems intended, first and foremost, to grab the audience by the lapels. There weren’t nine sequels to El Mariachi, but the annual gruesomeness of the Saw movies inevitably colored the red-meat kicks of the original film, at least in my mind. Granted, it was not as if I loved Saw the first time, but it’s striking to see how much the sequels grew away from the original when I had thought they were reinforcing it.

“I’m sick of people who don’t appreciate their blessings,” mutters Jigsaw at the end of the film, explaining his motives for torturing, traumatizing and/or killing so many people in Gordon’s circle. (Including his wife and child, who probably do appreciate their blessings, but are collateral damage here.) The notion that Jigsaw’s traps, if survived, can be a kind of life-affirming therapy is silly, as evidenced by Amanda (Shawnee Smith), a drug addict who lives to become Jigsaw’s apprentice in half the sequels. And yet, this would be another aspect of Saw that would be rotely integrated into the franchise, which seemed to cherry-pick all the worst things about it. Perhaps it’s because Wan and Whannell weren’t thinking about 10 Saw movies, so they could settle all the big, suspenseful questions before their Diabolique-like twist sends the audience out the door. 

Looking back on Saw now, I’d advise my 2004 self to not recoil so much at the idea of a quick-and-dirty, Ozploitation-style Seven that fully earned the response it got at Midnight Madness, despite being so rough around the edges. Seeing where Wan and Whannell’s careers have gone since, the DNA for superior pulp like Malignant and The Invisible Man is present in Saw, but refined by experience and a more developed sensibility. It made their careers. I’m sure they appreciate their blessings.