re:mote voices

Title: Saw

Cast: Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Ken Leung, Dina Meyer

Director: James Wan

With it’s moralistic approach to death there is an inevitability that the film Saw will be compared to Seven. Both having staged deaths, which are intended to comment on the lifestyle choices of their victims.

One of the strengths in Saw working is the opening sequence. Two strangers find themselves in a room. A decrepit bathroom, with each of the two men chained at opposite ends. Providing a certain level of disorientation for the audience and the characters. Slowly the pair piece together clues to realise they are caught in a sadistic game, which jogs one of their memories. Five months previously this doctor had been brought in by the police, a suspect in what they were calling the “jigsaw murders”. With this it becomes clear to him that the two of them are to be the latest victim of the killer – a killer who has never actually killed anyone, rather setting up convoluted traps, which force the victims to kill themselves.

The film then progresses along two threads – the two men stuck in the room, along with the slow recall of the previous jigsaw killings and how each of the men came to be in the room. To make matters worse, it becomes clear that the bait in this trap is that the killer has the doctor’s family, and unless he kills the other man, his family will die.

The visual feel of the film as a whole, and the manner in which the deaths are staged is done with Seven as a clear reference point. So that it’s influence would be pretty hard to deny. Flickering images, CCTV style interludes, a charged industrial edged soundtrack. But with that, as one would expect, Saw takes this influence and inevitably cranks it up. As a film Saw has been receiving mixed reviews, for me though Saw is actually quite effective. From the launching point of the dingy bathroom – the already present corpse, the rusted pipes, the splintered tiles, the shit filled toilet bowl – we have a definite picture. The material which is woven into that serves to heighten the tension rather than detract, as some would have it. The demonstration of how nasty this killer can be, how close the police have gotten to the killer and failed, and ultimately the timely reminders of the danger which faces the doctor’s family if he does not play along.