Review #380: Jigsaw (2017)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #8 - Jigsaw (2017)

After a seven-year hiatus (longer than the series had been around before the last entry), the Saw franchise came back with Jigsaw, a film titled by somebody with even less regard for naming conventions than whoever named the seventh film "Saw 3D". In this movie, it's been ten years John Kramer's death, when some bodies begin turning up with messages (seemingly from John himself) announcing that the games have begun anew. This is intercut with footage of five individuals trapped in one of Jigsaw's infamous deathtrap dungeons, all being forced to atone for their past sins by sacrificing life and limb at the altar of Jigsaw. Is John truly back from the dead, or is a copycat killer taking up the mantle? Or, could it be that someone has been there all along, carrying on Jigsaw's work?

I want to get right out and say: I think this is a great movie, all things considered. This is the type of movie the series should have been iterating on, instead of the absurdly serialized cat-and-mouse game that they spent the last four movies detailing. This one is entirely new characters (except for John Kramer himself, of course), but despite having no inherited connection to any of them, all of the characters (both on the cop side of things and in the deathtrap dungeon) feel fully fleshed-out, fully realized, well-acted, and with the right amount of pathos. This movie pulls off a very good cat-and-mouse game of its own (and it's just as good whether you've seen the whole series or not), and of course comes with a fantastic twist at the end, just as you've come to expect (even if a couple previous entries phoned theirs in).

This isn't the first time I've seen this movie (I saw it once back when it first came out), so I knew the twist going in on today's watch, and it helped me to notice something interesting: in a lot of ways, this movie is VERY similar to Saw II, which I also really liked. The structure is really similar, the ticking clock on the deathtrap dungeon is really similar, and the twist- I debated whether to spoil it or not because there are some things I have to say about it but I think I'll leave it unspoiled- the twist is VERY similar, in an abstract sort of way. I'm genuinely curious if this is a coincidence (it could just be that, when building a plot structure that has the appropriate amount of twists and turns, the two movies ended up similarly), or if the filmmakers looked at the previous movies, picked one that they liked and was successful, and used it as a loose blueprint for a sequel that fans would connect with. Whatever the case, I think it was a good move, because this one was WAY better than the last three movies in my opinion.

It's not perfect of course, as it falls victim to the same kind of logistical issues that the whole series has. Why is it that, with every entry, the traps become more complex, more involved, and more high-tech than the ones before (even when the timeline throws it somewhere in the middle)? Remember back in the first movie, where the trap was as simple as "you're chained to a wall, cut your foot off" or "you're stuck in a room full of razor wire, can you escape without cutting yourself on it?" Those were the work of someone largely operating alone with the stuff they had on hand. Now, everything is "here's a motion sensor that will set off a multi-stage pulley that will drag you closer to this buzzsaw, as soon as the buzzsaw detects some of your blood it will trigger a door that the chain can pass through bringing you to the next room where an autonomous doll will ride in on a bicycle with a recording that will cause needles to drop down, as soon as a sensor somewhere has detected the needles have been injected the chains will disengage and allow access to the next room". The first few movies made a bit of sense as something that was set up in advance and just left to sit there until triggered by a victim, but even then there were still times when you could tell someone was watching in case something went wrong (like when John himself had to zap Adam in Saw I for trying to evade the puzzle). Nowadays, we're supposed to assume everything is 100% autonomous due to all of Jigsaw's apprentices being dead and the only one(s) remaining being preoccupied with cop melodrama while the tests are going on, yet every dungeon is orders of magnitude more complicated and everything seemingly activates autonomously and all of the moving parts operate perfectly without any need for intervention. It makes sense as a movie series where the studios gets a bigger budget with each entry, but John didn't get a bigger budget for each deathtrap, right? And where was Hoffman getting the money needed to set up the traps he set up? Surely he wasn't spending his own money on this.

(Also, just one little bit of trivia that I didn't know where else to put: this movie says multiple times that John Kramer died ten years ago, and a character strongly implies that his first killings took place that same year. I've complained in the past that this series plays very loosey-goosey with giving any concrete details about when or where anything happened, and the only way the previous movies made any sense was if tons of time was passing between movies, which the movies themselves never seemed to say. This one, in as concrete of terms as we ever get in this series, shatters that notion by indicating that he was only in operation for a year. Which is absolutely bonkers considering the self-help writer in Saw 3D becoming famous by publishing a book about surviving a Jigsaw trap while John was still alive and relatively healthy.)

I'll end off with one more positive thing, and it's going to be a vague spoiler because I don't know how else to get this across without it: the way this movie gets recontextualized by the ending twist makes me think this is EXACTLY what I was hoping for when Saw II introduced Amanda as the new Jigsaw. They showed her as a confident, competent person who was a true believer in what Jigsaw was doing, and it made the future of the series feel incredible. This movie actually seems like it delivers on that promise. I still think I liked Saw II a little bit better than this one but they're very, very close.

Overall Rating: 9/10 Targets That Are Definitely Personal

The Price of Blood: In order to promote this movie and also do some good, the marketing for Jigsaw included an opportunity for moviegoers to get a free ticket if they donated blood in certain blood drives across the country!

Next Up: Spiral (2021)!