The Saw That Forgot How to Cut
There’s an old saying in horror: if you can’t top it, torture it. Jigsaw, the eighth installment in the Saw franchise, takes that philosophy and runs it straight into a buzzsaw—slowly, loudly, and with a complete lack of purpose. Directed by the Spierig Brothers, this 2017 sequel arrives like a zombie resurrected by Lionsgate’s accountants rather than any creative impulse.
For a movie obsessed with rules, traps, and logic puzzles, Jigsaw feels like it was assembled by someone trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with boxing gloves on. The result isn’t scary or clever—it’s a weirdly polite act of cinematic necromancy, where everyone pretends John Kramer is still scary even though he’s been dead longer than Blockbuster Video.
He’s Dead, Jim (But Let’s Pretend He’s Not)
The plot—if you can call it that—revolves around a fresh batch of unfortunate idiots who wake up chained in a barn, wearing buckets on their heads. They’re told to “shed blood to survive,” which is less a moral test and more the mission statement for this entire franchise. Meanwhile, police detectives investigate a new series of murders that look suspiciously like Jigsaw’s handiwork, despite the fact that John Kramer has been dead for a decade.
Yes, this is a Saw movie that opens with the words, “But how could Jigsaw still be alive?” and then spends 90 minutes failing to answer that question in any satisfying way. The eventual explanation involves flashbacks, secret apprentices, and a level of narrative gymnastics that would make M. Night Shyamalan say, “Okay, maybe slow down.”
The Barn of Bad Decisions
Inside the barn, the “game” unfolds with all the excitement of watching people lose at escape rooms while concussed. The five victims—whose names barely register before they’re reduced to hamburger—are forced into various traps that are equal parts gruesome and stupid. The first room involves buzzsaws and bloodletting, which could be symbolic if it weren’t just gross for gross’s sake.
Carly’s needle challenge feels like something rejected from Fear Factor for being too boring. Ryan’s leg trap offers the illusion of stakes (and also of OSHA violations). By the time someone gets ground up by a motorcycle-powered blender, you’re not horrified—you’re wondering if Jigsaw needs to update his Home Depot card.
The traps used to be metaphors—pain as penance, survival as rebirth. Here, they’re just random contraptions built by someone who’s seen too many YouTube tutorials on “DIY death machines.”
CSI: Clown School
Outside the barn, detectives Halloran and Hunt attempt to solve the world’s most obvious murder mystery, fumbling through morgues and exposition dumps like two golden retrievers trying to read Crime and Punishment. Their investigation leads them to Logan (Matt Passmore), a pathologist with a haunted stare and the charisma of damp drywall, and Eleanor (Hannah Emily Anderson), a Jigsaw fangirl who collects replica traps for fun—because apparently serial-killer Etsy stores are a thing now.
Eleanor is the film’s attempt at meta-commentary: “What kind of psycho would be obsessed with Jigsaw?” The movie then proceeds to answer, “Well, us.” It’s supposed to be self-aware; it just comes off as self-owning.
Tobin Bell: The One Good Thing
Let’s give credit where it’s due: Tobin Bell remains magnificent. Even in flashbacks (and fakeouts and hallucinations), his gravelly voice could make a voicemail terrifying. Bell’s Jigsaw has always been an unsettling contradiction—philosopher, sadist, moralist, madman—and every time he appears, Jigsaw momentarily feels like a real movie again.
The problem is, he’s barely in it. The Spierig Brothers treat him like a cameo in his own franchise, wheeling him out to mumble a few ominous lines before cutting back to characters nobody cares about. It’s like watching The Godfather if Michael Corleone only showed up to deliver a TED Talk on responsibility.
Flashbacks, Twistbacks, and Backscratches
Jigsaw’s storytelling is so convoluted it deserves its own trap. Half the film takes place in the present, half in flashbacks, and none of it seems aware of which half it’s in. By the end, we learn that the barn game actually happened ten years earlier—because, apparently, continuity is just another thing to mutilate.
Logan, one of the players, turns out to have been Jigsaw’s very first apprentice. Not Amanda. Not Hoffman. Some guy we just met, who apparently learned everything about morality and trap design in one long afternoon. The “twist” lands with the dull thud of a prosthetic limb hitting the floor. It’s not shocking—it’s exhausting.
This is the cinematic equivalent of a magician pulling a dead rabbit out of his hat and insisting it was alive all along.
The Spierig Touch: A Light Massage, No Pulse
The Spierig Brothers, who previously directed Daybreakers and Predestination, try to inject slick style into the Sawtemplate. They clean up the grime, polish the lighting, and color-correct the movie until it looks like a horror film shot in a hospital waiting room.
But that slickness kills what little menace remains. The original Saw films thrived on their filth—grimy basements, flickering bulbs, green-tinted sweat. Jigsaw looks like a detergent commercial about cleanliness. Even the gore feels sanitized, as though the MPAA told them, “You can decapitate him, but please, make it tasteful.”
It’s not scary, it’s sterile. The traps gleam. The blood looks airbrushed. You could eat off the torture devices, which is probably the worst compliment a horror director could ever receive.
The Moral of the Story (There Isn’t One)
John Kramer’s twisted morality—his belief in punishment as enlightenment—was always the franchise’s rotten heart. You might not agree with him, but you understood him. In Jigsaw, his philosophy has been reduced to a PowerPoint presentation titled “Murder, But Make It Meaningful.”
The victims’ sins range from tragic to absurd. One guy sold a bad motorcycle. Another snatched a purse. In Kramer’s universe, these crimes are apparently punishable by liquefaction. It’s hard to feel any moral tension when the victims’ worst sin is existing in this script.
By the end, Jigsaw’s famous line—“I want to play a game”—sounds less like a threat and more like a cry for help.
The Puzzle Pieces Don’t Fit
The Saw franchise, at its best, was grimy, clever, and cruelly efficient. Jigsaw tries to resurrect that formula but forgets to add suspense, characters, or reason. It’s the cinematic equivalent of finding an old toy in the attic and realizing the batteries have leaked acid all over it.
Everything feels tired: the flashbacks, the twists, the moral monologues, the obligatory montage of “Aha!” moments explaining nothing. Even the editing—the franchise’s signature strobe-light chaos—feels halfhearted. This is not a game; it’s a nap with background screaming.
Final Thoughts: A Puzzle You Should Leave Unsolved
Jigsaw isn’t a movie—it’s a contractual obligation with fake blood. It wants to reboot the series but doesn’t know how to start the engine, so it just sits there revving the corpse. For a film about life and death, it feels weirdly lifeless.
Tobin Bell deserves better. The audience deserves better. Even the traps deserve better engineering. By the end, when Logan mutters, “I speak for the dead,” you can’t help but think, “Yeah, this franchise is one of them.”
If you’re looking for a film that challenges your morality, provokes your fear, or at least respects your intelligence, look elsewhere. If, however, you’ve ever wanted to watch a once-iconic series perform its own autopsy, Jigsaw is your bucket-headed masterpiece.
Game over—and please, for everyone’s sake, stop hitting “Restart.”
