Reviewed by Aaron Yap

"MOVIES don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative!": Kevin Williamson's nugget of slasher self-reflexivity from Scream seemed like a smart psychological and socially astute barb at the time. But now there's Saw, the stakes in cinematic art-imitates-life-and-vice-versa irony have risen to a new level: it's not that movies make psychos more creative, it's that they make budding screenwriters more inventive, demented and ultimately, illogical.


Such is the case with Aussie writer and co-star of Saw, Leigh Whannell, who must have spent a lot of time in his formative years consuming copious servings of Grand Guignol giallo and serial killer flicks. His script, directed by James Wan, is a wildly uneven and laughably messy compendium of psycho thriller cliches, but the unabashed OTT-ness of its macabre machinations make the film the most giddily perverse genre guilty pleasure to come along since the woefully underrated The Butterfly Effect.

The opening scene is an irresistibly diabolical puzzle of a predicament that'll blow chunks out of Vincenzo (Cube, Cypher) Natali's cerebrum: two strangers wake up and find themselves in a run-down, shit-stained toilet, shackled at the ankles to pipes. In the middle of a room lies a dead body with a gun in one hand, and a tape recorder in the other. We soon learn the blonde guy is Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and the weedy guy is Adam (Whannell). Their true connection remains nebulously guarded for a while, but they're given an assortment of objects to help figure out the situation: a key, an envelope, a taped message, a pair of saws, and a cellphone. Realising that he might have an answer to their problem, Gordon flashes back to his involvement in a homicide case with David Tapp (Danny Glover), a detective on the trail of the Jigsaw Killer, a psychopath who contructs elaborately designed torture traps for his victims.

Saw is not a good film per se, but as a pure genre exercise bristling with twisted ideas and a keen sense of grisly, trashy fun, it's heaven. Wan directs with fiendish glee, and mounts an agreeably slick mid-budget look, but he ultimately fails to coherently reign in a deviously tricky, timeline-juggling narrative. He resorts to herky-jerky MTV histrionics a la Marilyn Mason vids much too often, and by the climax, seems to have surrendered control and left the last reel chaos and anguish to take over.

The premise of a serial killer who doesn't technically kill his victims is a nifty, outlandish one, and Whannell engineers some deliciously sadistic moments, the best being the sequence where a girl faces the dicey dilemma of unlocking a reverse bear trap from her head. Of course, the film is derivative as hell: echoes of Se7en – the decaying decor, the dark, nihilistic atmosphere, the killer's moral high horse – reverberate throughout. However, Wan and Whannell are equally indebted to the black-gloved giallo cinema of Dario Argento. Spot the nods: the ventriloquist puppet from Deep Red is revisited here in the form of a masked puppet messenger rolling out from the shadows on a tricycle, while a scene where the killer's victim is forced to work his way out of a cage of barbwire blatantly quotes Suspiria, although with twice its flinch level. The twist ending, augmented with quick, lightning-edited eureka! rewind montage, is a deranged, laugh-out-loud highlight – a perfectly preposterous wrap-up to this perfectly preposterous movie.

The performances are all over the show, none of them particularly note-worthy: Danny Glover is a hoot in a role where he seems to be channelling his Switchback red herring ghost, Whannell is adequate though acting is obviously not his forte, but the film's true stink-up-the-screen moments belong to Brit Carl Elwes. Complete with wavering American accent, his performance runs the gamut from wooden to astonishingly shrill, and his agonizing climactic proclamations of "I'll kill you if you hurt my family" is such a riot of am-dram over-emoting, it seems a miracle he made it past the (mis)casting stage.

Not recommended for viewers with weak-stomached dispositions, Saw is one of those films that you enter into, become sucked in by its primal, throat-grabbing audacity, then leave the theatre feeling its logic crumble as your eyes adjust to the sunlight.