By the tenth film in the Saw franchise, you’d think we’d run out of people willing to wake up in a dimly lit warehouse with a bucket over their head and a cassette tape calling them out for not recycling. But no — Saw X arrives determined to prove that even the Grim Reaper can franchise. This installment attempts something bold for a series known for industrial-grade murder puzzles: it tries to be… heartfelt?
Unfortunately, the heart is the part most audiences will want surgically removed.
Jigsaw in Mexico: Medical Tourism, But Make It Murder
The plot — stitched together like a DIY autopsy — sees terminally ill John Kramer traveling to Mexico in hopes that an experimental cancer treatment will save him. In other words, Saw X kicks off like a week-long medical tourism vlog, except instead of reviews of the local cuisine, we get a montage of John smiling ruefully at sunshine and bonding with a random child. Because, you see, Jigsaw has a soft side. A tender side. A “let’s all hold hands and beat cancer together” side.
This tonal shift is about as subtle as a reverse bear trap snapping your jaw across the room.
When John discovers the whole procedure was a scam, he reacts the way any terminally ill genius engineer with a God complex would: by kidnapping everyone involved, dragging them into a dirty warehouse, and forcing them to rip themselves apart like the world’s least successful escape room team.
It’s capitalism, but make it gory.
The Scammers: A Cast of Characters Who Probably Deserved a Mild Fine Instead
The villains — the crooked medical team — are not exactly Hannibal Lecter. They’re barely even the villains from a mid-level insurance commercial. But Saw X wants us to believe they’re so cartoonishly evil that carving themselves open is a fair karmic penalty. This is the true horror: the movie expects you to root for the guy building artisanal death traps.
There’s Valentina, who amputates her own leg only for the trap to say, “Wrong answer!” and lob off her head. There’s Mateo, whose job is to drill into his skull like he’s trying to install a skylight. There’s Gabriela, who gets microwaved by radiation until she looks like a forgotten Hot Pocket.
And there’s Cecilia, the mastermind scammer, whose personality can best be described as “LinkedIn influencer, but homicidal.” She even weaponizes intestines, which is the kind of initiative most employers say they want but don’t actually want.
Amanda Returns, Still the Most Stressed Employee in Horror
Every Saw film features at least one person who looks like they deeply regret answering a Craigslist ad. In Saw X, that is Amanda Young. Shawnee Smith gives her all, but it’s hard to deliver nuanced emotional conflict when half your job is screaming things like, “Play the game or die!” while babysitting a man chained to a pipe.
Amanda spends most of the movie spiraling into empathetic turmoil. Jigsaw, meanwhile, watches everything like a proud stage dad at a middle-school talent show.
If this were a workplace comedy, she’d be the burned-out assistant managing a tyrannical boss and his increasingly unreasonable “team-building exercises.”
The Traps: Complicated Ways of Saying “Therapy Might’ve Helped”
The franchise’s signature death traps return in Saw X, and they’re as over-engineered as ever — the kind of devices that make you wonder whether John Kramer missed his true calling designing theme park rides.
The bomb-arm flesh-cutting challenge.
The leg-saw-bone-marrow scale.
The brain-drill tissue-dissolve experiment.
The radiation sledgehammer embraces self-harm speedruns.
The blood-waterboarding machine.
The gas-filled room with the “one person can breathe” ventilation hole.
These contraptions speak volumes: specifically, that John Kramer had way too much free time and access to industrial supplies that no terminally ill retiree should logically possess.
By film ten, the traps have evolved from metaphors about guilt into elaborate metaphors about script fatigue. The logic is gone. The morality is gone. The traps are now just the unhinged Etsy projects of a man who refuses to die on schedule.
Tobin Bell: The Franchise’s One Unkillable Treasure
Tobin Bell still plays John Kramer with the same calm menace you’d expect from a man who has Googled “how to sue the universe for wrongful death.” His voice is smoother than a bedtime story and colder than the tile floor of a murder dungeon. He brings gravitas the script does not deserve.
But here, the movie makes the bizarre choice to portray Jigsaw as a tragic hero. There’s soft lighting! A happy montage! Emotional bonding with a child! For a moment you forget this man once made someone dig a key out of acid using a plastic spoon.
When movies start giving serial killers redemption arcs, you know Hollywood has completely lost its moral compass. Freddy Krueger is probably watching from hell thinking, “Where was MY heartwarming prequel?”
The Ending: Because Every Saw Film Must End with a Twist, No Matter How Exhausted We All Are
The climax sees Cecilia and Parker gassing themselves in a sealed room, fighting over a single ventilation hole like two raccoons arguing over a trash can. John and Amanda stroll out with the kid, leaving Cecilia behind to die coughing and screaming.
Justice is served, I guess? In the same way a raccoon tearing open your drywall serves nature?
The epilogue tosses in Hoffman like a Marvel post-credit cameo — a reminder that this universe will never die, even though it probably should’ve been humanely euthanized around Saw IV.
So… Is Saw X Good?
If you like watching people mangled in Rube Goldberg torture machines while an elderly cancer patient lectures them about morality like a disappointed gym teacher, you’ll have a great time. If you want meaningful horror, coherent themes, or anything resembling subtlety, this movie will leave you wanting — wanting the power to travel back in time to 2004 and whisper into James Wan’s ear:
“End it after the first one, man. Just end it.”
Final Verdict
Saw X is a film that tries to be emotional, thoughtful, and surprisingly wholesome — while also making people tear out pieces of their skull with kitchen appliances. It’s like a Hallmark movie got lost and wandered onto the set of Hostel.
Was anyone asking for a heartwarming prequel about Jigsaw learning life lessons in Mexico? No. Did we get one anyway? Yes. Is it good? Bold of you to ask.
It is, without question, the best-reviewed film in the franchise — which is like being the healthiest corpse in the morgue.
