Review #376: Saw IV (2007)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #4 - Saw IV (2007)

Hot off the heels of Saw III, Saw IV begins a mini-series of entries that solidifies the plot into a snarl of timeline jumps and continuity that will leave your head spinning. In this movie, the primary plot follows Rigg, the SWAT leader for the police force in whatever town these movies take place. After the disappearance of Detective Matthews in Saw II and Kerry in Saw III, Rigg is spiraling into depression as he feels responsible for the loss of his co-workers and his inability to find closure. But then he gets caught in one of Jigsaw's famous games- will he sit tight and let things play out, or will he charge headfirst into danger if it means stopping this twisted game once and for all?

I mentioned in my last review that I felt the filmmakers of this series really sat down and had a long think about where the series was going to go; while I could see they spent the third movie seeding a lot of the material that would eventually take shape, this movie is really the one where it all starts to become solid. I think this is a well-made and well-plotted movie (much better than the last one), though it really does start this series feeling like a jumble of nonsensical twists and scenes that don't actually take place when or where you think they do, that's going to become more and more pronounced as the series goes on. I'm going to spoil one of the twists in this review (don't worry, the movie has a lot of them, the one I spoil is fairly minor in the grand scheme) because I want to talk about what I think is a pretty big plot hole, but otherwise I think this is a good film. (Honestly, I think I kind of forget about this one most of the time- or at least I feel like it blurs together with the next two- because it's good to the point where it just feels natural for the story, it doesn't really stand out in any extremely positive or negative way.) If you really really don't want anything spoiled about this one, this one is a solid 7/10 Superfluous Blocks of Ice. 

Let me talk a bit about what I think this movie does right, specifically compared to the last one. Something I dinged the last entry for was the fact that the protagonist (at least, the one engaging with the deathtraps) didn't need to do anything in order to survive, he literally could have just stood by and did nothing and he would have been fine (and also, he knew this was the case- the whole "lesson" was that Jigsaw wanted him to forgive the people who wronged him and put himself in danger in their place, there was never anything compelling him to engage with any of the deathtraps other than his own self-driven changed of character). Technically that is true in this entry as well, but with just about everything there's a way to do it right, and a way to do it wrong, and this movie did it right. Rigg having the option to sit by and do nothing is really the point of the film- that's the challenge for Rigg, Jigsaw knows he can't let himself stand by and do nothing, he HAS to charge into danger and save the day. It would take extreme effort of his part to sit idly by, and Jigsaw is banking on him not being able to do that. (Compare that to Jeff in part 3, where Jigsaw knows he has been mentally preparing himself for the event where he can watch these people die, so in his case it would take extreme effort on his part to NOT sit idly by.) Exactly like in Saw II, Jigsaw is once again telling someone "All you have to do is sit there and do nothing, and your loved one will be fine" because he knows they will never do that. And so, Rigg charges off, true to character, and pays the price for it.

I also complained about how I didn't care about any of the characters in Saw III; I can't say the same about Saw IV. These are (mostly) characters I've been getting to know for two or three movies, so I'm way more invested in Rigg's plight than I was about Jeff's. (There are some new characters, like Strahm and Jill, but I knew going into this watch that I'm going to be getting more out of those characters in the future, which is more than I can say about Rigg, Jeff, or Lynn.) The characters in this one feel strong, they feel understood by the writer, and they feel like real people and real archetypes that the movie is making a statement about. This is all to say I think the characters are the strongest part of this movie by far.

Now, there's something in here that I think this movie does wrong. I can see what the filmmakers were going for, but I don't think it works the way they want it to, and I think it has bad implications for the future. One of the big twists in this movie is that you think this is all happening after the events of the previous movie, when in fact, it's happening parallel to it. The film starts out with a scene where the coroner is performing an autopsy on John Kramer, so obviously you're going to assume this is after the last movie, right? Wrong! That scene is being shown outside of the timeline of the rest of the film- that singular scene happens AFTER the rest of the movie. This series is no longer just doing flashbacks, now they're doing flash forwards, and intentionally using them to trick the audience into thinking the movie is taking place at a time when it isn't. I'm not going to say this tactic is unilaterally bad, but it certainly is cheap. It's playing on the audience's goodwill in order to deceive them in a "I'm not touching you" sort of way- they never outright state that this movie is taking place after the previous movie, they just strongly imply it.

And that's where this movie creates a plot hole: they also strongly imply it during the rest of the movie too. There's a scene where police have located Kerry's corpse, after she was killed in the previous movie in a deathtrap that Amanda made to be impossible. During this scene, they're debating who could have put Kerry into that deathtrap, because John Kramer was in such a poor state the last time they saw him (referring to the events of Saw II). One of them posits that maybe Amanda put her in the trap (which they rule out because of how small Amanda was), which is an outright statement of the fact that the police are well aware that Amanda is working with Jigsaw. But the problem with that is... if this is taking place before she and John Kramer have been found dead, then how do the police know this? Nobody knew that during the events of Saw II (the whole point of that movie was that the ending revealed it for the first time), but the only member of the police that would have been privy to this reveal was Detective Matthews, who has been missing ever since. So who told the cops that Amanda was working with Jigsaw?

There's only two ways I can think this would happen, and both are equally absurd and unlikely. The first is that somehow the footage being streamed to the computers in Saw II showed something afterward that clued the cops in to this (like, after Amanda and Daniel fled from Xavier, she came back up into the murder house and had a conversation with John on-camera or something), which would be absolutely bonkers for John to not delete before setting up his intricate masterful trap for Detective Matthews. The second is that Hoffman (who, I guess this is a moderate spoiler, is also one of Jigsaw's apprentices) fed this information to the cops, but how and why? Both of these scenarios are so bizarre and counter-intuitive that there's no way the filmmakers would leave them up to the audience to assume. So the only option we're left with, is that they were so eager to get this timeline twist into the movie that they didn't realize the script contradicted itself.

Really, this is all just a consequence of killing off the most compelling character in this entire series. There's still six more movies (so far) where they continue to milk Tobin Bell for his Jigsaw performance, twisting and contorting every movie into a bramblebush of ways to justify why everyone is still hanging onto Jigsaw even though he's been dead for more than half the series. I know they would never do this (because of money), but they really should have either killed off Jigsaw and just had the series be about his apprentices, or not killed him off. It really does a disservice to the series as a whole when they are unable to move on and do something out of John Kramer's shadow.

Anyway, this movie is really good and I hope the rest of them turn out better than I remember.

Overall Rating: 7/10 Superfluous Blocks of Ice

Blink And You'll Miss It: Just in case you were wondering where Jigsaw found all those other victims for his traps, this movie shows John's first encounters with Addison (one of the women trapped in the house in Saw II), Paul (the guy in the razorwire trap in Saw I), Donnie (the guy whose stomach Amanda had to cut the key out of in Saw I), and Gus (the guy who gets shot by the peephole gun in Saw II)!

Next Up: Saw V (2008)!