Watching Saw X one might safely assume that Tobin Bell was lured back to the series with the promise that, for this installment, he would get to do everything he ever wanted in a Saw movie. A serious actor, Bell surely knows this bloody franchise will be what he’s best remembered for, and he treats the role of John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer, like it’s Shakespeare. Though he’s typically heard more than he’s seen in these films, taking a backseat or relegated to flashbacks while others follow his prerecorded instructions, Saw X places him in almost every scene. By the time Billy the puppet shows up, it feels like a franchise obligation; Bell’s Kramer has finally upstaged his more merchandisable avatar.
Now in his eighties, while still improbably playing a 52-year-old man, Bell may not have many more of these in him. If this is his last, it makes for a fitting swan song, allowing him to play a wider range of moods and moments than the formula typically permits. In the manner of Renny Harlin deciding that, for A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy Krueger was actually the hero, director Kevin Greutert positions John in a similar role here. Typically, the viewer feels at least a touch of sympathy for the damaged souls forced to test their mettle in Jigsaw’s elaborate dismemberment contraptions. This time, not so much. They’re awful people who—at least in horror movie terms—deserve it.
Were this installment numbered like a Disney direct-to-video sequel, it would more accurately be called Saw 1-1/2, taking place between the first two films, before Kramer has fully resigned himself to the terminal nature of his cancer. Inspired by the seemingly miraculous recovery of a fellow patient (Michael Beach) in group therapy, he follows the guy’s advice and contacts off-the-grid doctor Cecilia Pederson (Norwegian former film critic and model Synnøve Macody Lund), who runs a clinic in an abandoned chemical factory in Mexico, which would probably raise red flags for all but the most desperate.
Greutert previously directed Saw VI in 2009, at the height of the Obamacare debates, and it remains one of the most popular installments, for throwing a corrupt health insurance executive into Jigsaw’s chamber of tortures. Here, Greutert draws from a similar well, aiming at the quack cure industry which takes advantage of anti-vaxxers and anyone else for whom the phrase “Big Pharma” is an automatic trigger. The cancer treatment turns out to be utterly bogus, of course, but the chemical factory is the ideal location for Jigsaw to rig up a few traps and mete out surgery-inspired punishments.
The first Saw movie to be told in linear fashion, Saw X sort-of features more homemade, improvised traps, since Jigsaw doesn’t really have the luxury of choosing the time and the place here to the usual degree. They’re still way more elaborate than anyone other than a fictional movie character could rig up, even with help, but this time with more of a personal touch as he opts to explain the situation to his victims face-to-face.
There’s also way more humor here than usual, with one character actively mocking series tropes, and a sickly funny parody of happy montages when Kramer briefly thinks he might be cured. We even get to see a fantasy sequence demonstrating that his daydreams are as twisted as his reality. The best gag of all, though, is a subtle one, and it’s all Bell: when he sees his (fake) surgery area prepared in a newly created room right in the middle of the chemical factory, there’s a brief glint of admiration and mutual respect in his eyes. One brilliant engineer of incision machines in unlikely places recognizes another, or so he thinks.
For casual fans who may wonder, the gore gets intense this time around, sometimes explicitly showing what prior installments only implied, like the graphic sawing off of a leg. Intestines used as a lasso feel more like something out of Peter Jackson’s early splatter-comedies, but the moment adds to the slight air of self-parody at play. It’s not something that derails the stakes, but its intense gruesomeness may elicit laughs as well as dry heaves.
Story-wise, Saw X has no real reason to exist—it’s a self-contained narrative accessible to franchise newcomers, with Bell and a returning Shawnee Smith not even trying to look 20 years younger, as they would be chronologically. The same, however, could be said of many of the sequels—their true reason for being is that there’s an audience for the self-mutilation machines, and for Bell’s memorable presence as a narcissistic moralist with skewed priorities. If the latter is the primary draw, Saw X indulges, delivering an all-timer of a slasher lead performance in addition to more guts and gore than expected. Fans who tune in mainly for the insane timeline twists won’t get them, but otherwise, this is the most satisfying Saw installment since the first three. Also, be sure to stick around for a mid-credits scene.
Saw X opens in theaters September 29