Review #373: Saw (2004)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #1 - Saw (2004)

Saw is a film where two men wake up in a grungy bathroom, chained to the wall by their ankles, with no memory of how they got there. There's a dead body in the center of the room with a gun and a tape recorder. After some escape-room-style investigation, they discover a pair of hacksaws- not strong enough to cut through the chains, but strong enough to cut through their feet. They realize that their predicament must be the work of "the Jigsaw killer"- an enigmatic villain who kidnaps people and sets them in elaborate traps where they must overcome their own flaws, or die. Will they be able to follow the clues and figure out how to escape? Or will they need to saw off their feet for a chance at survival?

I first heard about this movie around the time the second one came out, right after I graduated high school. And to be perfectly honest, just the premise terrified me. (I was still pretty new to horror at the time, and the idea of being stuck in a deathtrap made my skin crawl.) This movie truly is something great- the setup is simple but deep, the characters are flawed but interesting, and the plot moves quickly and has no shortage of twists and turns as it goes. It's no wonder this spawned a massive franchise of ten movies (and counting)- Saw started a phenomenon and it deserves every penny it's earned.

That being said, looking back at it after all of these years, it doesn't quite hold up as well as I thought it would. This was a very, VERY low budget movie, and it shows. The sets are incredibly sparse and limited, the special effects are incredibly understated most of the time, and frankly there's a bunch of shots in this movie where I had to think, "That's the one they went with? Did they not have enough film to get a second take?" The characters are interesting, but the performances really leave something to be desired. Cary Elwes is always a delight, except in this movie. He's doing a really bad American accent (I honestly don't know why the character of Dr. Gordon couldn't just have been English), and some of his line deliveries and reactions are just so... bizarre, and hammed-up, that again I wonder if maybe they barely had enough money to pay for one take's worth of film. And it's not just Cary Elwes- Leigh Whannell isn't doing a spectacular job either (though in his case it's more a matter of the script being laughable than his acting), and even Danny Glover feels like he's phoned in his performance.

That all being said, this is a GREAT movie. Sure the patina has rubbed off a bit over the years, but the setup and atmosphere for this movie is fantastic. The imagery and the creativity behind the traps is top-notch. And the twists- man, there are some AMAZING twists in here, right up until the last minute the plot is still throwing you curveballs. Twists will kind of become this series' trademark, for better and for worse, and it all started right here, with two guys chained up in a bathroom around a dead body.

I have more to say about the series as a whole but I think I'll probably revisit some of the things this movie did when I compare it with the future entries. For this one alone, though, it's VERY good, and well deserving of the acclaim it's gotten!

Overall Rating: 8/10 One-Way Phones

Maybe It Was For Budget Reasons: With one exception (the burned corpse in one of the trap flashbacks), every corpse in this movie is played by a real actor, without use of dummies or mannequins. That means that Tobin Bell had to lay motionless on the floor of the bathroom set the entire time they were filming!