Saw X (2023) – Bloody Brilliant

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 28th September
Seen: 28th September

By the time a horror franchise hits the 10th film, it’s safe to say that things will be well off course. By the time Friday the 13th was 10 films deep, they sent Jason into space. By the time Halloween was 10 films deep, it was finishing up its first set of remakes. By the time Nightmare on Elm Street was 10 films deep… actually we don’t know because Nightmare never made it to 10 films, that’s how rare it is to make that many films in a horror franchise. So you can imagine the general nervous anticipation that was building up with the announcement of Saw X, a return to the original timeline of the franchise after the mild detours of Jigsaw and Spiral, which could’ve failed spectacularly but somehow it ended up being one of the best of the franchise.

Saw X takes place between the first and second Saw movies with John Kramer (Tobin Bell) dealing with the harsh reality of his cancer diagnosis. After attending some group therapy meetings, he hears about a brand new experimental treatment that’s being run by Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund). At first, things seem to go well until John realises something truly horrible… there was no treatment, no surgery, everything that John had hoped would cure him was a lie told to swindle him and other dying cancer patients out of everything they had. Seems like Cecilia and her assistants messed with the wrong man because John, with the assistance of his protege Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) has gotten all of the people who tried to swindle John together in one large abandoned building so they can play a game.

The Saw franchise seems to be at its absolute best when it uses the sledgehammer of extreme gore to take a few shots at a major political topic. Saw VI tackled the healthcare industry as a whole, Spiral took on police corruption and in Saw X the target of the political sledgehammer are grifters who take advantage of people. Every single ‘victim’ is a deeply unlikeable charlatan, the kind who would sell you shitty brain pills made of soy while also insisting that soy makes you weak and watching all of them get their comeuppance is almost cathartic. There are no heroes here, no one to root for, no one here has a good reason to survive because they’re secretly noble… Everyone in the building has, at some point, taken advantage of the sick and the dying and there’s a catharsis in watching them suffer for their sins.

When I say there is no one in the building to root for, that is excluding one genuinely surprising figure… John Kramer. For several decades now John Kramer has been an absolutely detestable villain, playing with the technicality that he doesn’t do the physical murder of his victims but just puts them in situations with a 99.9% chance of gruesome death. He’s been an enjoyable villain but almost never a sympathetic one, the closest he came was in part 6 when he was taking on the insurance lobby and even then, it was just because of who he was up against. This time? This time they really went all out to make sure that John Kramer is not only understandable, he’s a disturbing anti-hero with a moral code that you can’t help but actually feel bad for.

Throughout the first act of Saw X, you actually see John Kramer think that maybe he’s going to be OK, he’s going to actually survive this and it works because Tobin Bell gives probably the best performance of his career. It’s a wild ride to witness, from the absolute despair of the original diagnosis, to just barely keeping everything together long enough to get into the experimental treatment, to the actual hope and joy that comes with being told that it worked, all of it creates a fascinating picture of a man who had his second chance and was on the verge of change… and then it gets torn away and Tobin sells the hell out of every moment of pain and anguish, it’s a carefully controlled performance that commands your attention and feels brutally real. John Kramer is a man being destroyed by cancer and he’s going to make sure every person who cost him precious time and hope will pay before he goes.

Somehow Saw X manages to avoid one of the big problems that prequels often fall into, namely it knows that the audience is well aware of John Kramer’s ultimate fate. Let’s be honest, at this point if you’re going to see Saw X then you’ve seen a fair chunk of the rest of the franchise so you know that the villain dies in the third movie and never really comes back. This movie doesn’t even really bother suggesting that anything could happen to John, the tension never comes from the worry that he might not get out of this. No, the tension comes from just wondering how specifically John’s going to make his assorted victims pay for their grift.

There are no punches being pulled here at all, Saw X wants to take out some rage on people who deserve it and god damn does it do it well. The Saw franchise is generally known for its unique traps and once again they’ve gone above and beyond to create some truly shocking ones that bring on the shock and gore that the fans crave (the brain surgery trap might be the most messed up thing this franchise has ever done). There’s a wild creativity to how many ways the filmmakers can dispatch one of the many horrible people that make up the room full of eventual cadavers and each one is filmed beautifully, or at least as beautifully as you can film multiple mutilations and murders. 

Saw X is stunning in how good it is, showing there’s still a lot of blood left in this franchise. Brutal and horrifying with a powerful political message and all the flesh-ripping fun that any fan could want, Saw X is one of the best entries in this long-running franchise. Throw on top of all the gore an absolute all-time great performance by Tobin Bell (seriously, the man treats this film like it’s goddamn Shakespeare and I love him for it) and you have something surprisingly special from a franchise that many would have regarded as basically dead a few years ago. Turns out Saw still has a little more gas in the tank and if they can somehow keep the quality up like this, it won’t be a shock if they get another couple of films out of this bloody little series.