Review #381: Spiral (2021)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #9 - Spiral (2021)

Spiral (originally titled "Spiral: From the Book of Saw" whatever that's supposed to mean) is the ninth entry in the Saw series, and seems to have been written as an explicit spin-off rather than a numbered entry (but the next movie is called Saw X so I guess that went out the window). Featuring none of the characters from any previous Saw film (only name-dropping John Kramer a couple times and one scene where a few photos of past characters are seen), this one follows Chris Rock as Detective Zeke Banks, a loose cannon cop who has drawn a big target on his back after he ratted out a corrupt partner a few years back. When several cops from the precinct start turning up dead (or, at least, their body parts start being delivered to the station with Zeke's attention), the clues seem to point to a Jigsaw copycat. Will Zeke be able to track down and stop the culprit, or will he find out that the killer is closer than he could have imagined?

I first watched this movie a few years back, and I'm going to be honest, I barely remembered anything about it. I didn't remember who the killer was (I did piece it together pretty quickly on this rewatch, I can't say for certain if I remembered it or if I just noticed the clues this time), I didn't remember anything about the conflict, really all I remembered was one trap at the very end (the marionette thing, if you know you know). So I didn't really go in with high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised!

While I don't really think this is a great entry in the series, I do really wish more of the Saw movies were like this. A new set of characters, an interesting twist on Jigsaw, a copycat killer who isn't even really pretending to follow Jigsaw's ethos but instead using the iconography as inspiration for a new type of justice- the series got so incredibly beholden to John Kramer as a figurehead that a good five or six entries had to twist themselves in knots just to figure out how to tell the story while still keeping it about John (even long after he had been killed off). Like, holy crap, how refreshing is it to see a Saw movie where we aren't constantly flashing back to events shoved in between scenes of other movies? This one has the confidence to tell its own Saw-like story about its own characters in it own setting and it all just worked. Again, I wouldn't call it great, but it's a competent film telling a competent story.

I also really appreciated how the traps are almost incidental in this movie. It's a story about characters first, and I guess there's a few traps thrown in but there's no prolonged, largely-disconnected sequence involving a bunch of people stuck in a deathtrap dungeon- the only traps that we see are encountered in the moment, and while some of them are a bit elaborate (like the marionette thing I mentioned earlier) there's a couple that are pleasantly simple, like the very first one where basically a guy wakes up with his tongue clamped in a vice and he has to rip his own tongue out if he wants to get out of the way of an oncoming train. It's almost brilliant in its simplicity, and really harkens back to the very first movie where the traps actually felt like something someone could plan out and execute without an entire team of engineers and surveillance. (But, to reiterate, not all of them. The marionette and finger traps are still laughably overdesigned.)

I really did like how this one felt like a simpler movie, with no ongoing lore or ties to pre-existing characters that I had to remember from earlier movies. I also really liked how the killer had their own ethos that they lived by, I know I said it earlier but it felt like such a breath of fresh air to not have them pretending to follow John Kramer's own inconsistent worldview. I really, really think this is what the rest of the series should have been!

That being said, the actual writing was a bit lackluster. The characters are all running at a 10 on the anger scale for the entire movie (everyone is yelling, always) so there's nowhere for the emotion to go. Some of the character interactions are a bit underdeveloped, and I wish we had seen a bit more of the crooked cop stuff that gets thrown at us in the last five minutes of the film. Also, this is hard to quantify exactly, but it was just a tad bit... boring, for lack of a better term. I can kind of see why I didn't remember much about this movie from my first viewing, and I have a feeling I'm going to forget this viewing too in a year or so. So it has some ups, and some downs.

Still a definite recommend from me though!

Overall Rating: 7/10 Fans Blowing Shards of Glass

Easter Egg: I noticed while watching that the vault door in the police station basement had the name "Vincent & Jules" printed on it. This is of course referring to the two hitmen from Pulp Fiction, one of which was played by Samuel L. Jackson, who is in this film!

Next Up: Saw X (2023)!