Post 3 Group C-- What a Twist (Saw) by Zach Helmstetter

WARNING: SAW SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, PROCEED IF YOU STILL WISH!!

When I sat down to watch Saw I assumed that it was a thriller that used body horror and sadistic traps to maintain the audience’s attention. Boy was I wrong! Saw follows a very Lost (TV Series) style of storytelling, following our main cast through all sorts of twists, turns, and shocking plot development through the use of flash backs and character building all while continuing to shock you in ways a horror movie should i.e. not always jump scares. The film is in no way a masterpiece and yet it provided the kind of psychological horror fears akin to many classic movies of the same genre such as Silence of the Lambs. You start the film feeling that everything is straight forward: two men who are captured by The Jigsaw Killer (later known as Jigsaw) and are attempting to escape this disgusting bathroom with a dead man in the center. You end with way, WAY more questions then you thought you would.

The reason you find yourself with more questions is the information given to you in the form of flashbacks about our two trapped characters, Lawrence and Adam, revealing that even though we are told these characters, Jigsaw, and his accomplice have no connection to one another that they are not who they say they are. We find out that Jigsaw is Lawrence’s patient, Lawrence being an oncologist. Adam is a photographer, specifically one frequently paid to photograph people and they’re day to day activities. Ex-Detective Tapp hired Adam to track Lawrence, his reason being that Tapp was sure that Lawrence was the jigsaw killer. We then find that someone we think is Jigsaw takes Lawrence’s family hostage in order to get him to kill Adam. That person ends up being Lawrence’s orderly at the hospital Zep who is following Jigsaw’s orders in order to get an antidote for the slow acting poison being used on him. At the end of the film the corpse in the center of the room stands up only to reveal himself as Jigsaw.

Are you confused? So was I as I watched all this for the first time. Much of the information given to us as viewers people would call twists. When people refer to something in a book, movie, etc as a twist they tend to mean it in a way that is a piece of shocking and unexpected information. Saw utilizes twists and these flashbacks to create feelings of suspense and disbelief throughout the movie. One instance of this twist coming into action is the reveal of John Kramer, or Jigsaw, and who that is. The movie keeps this a secret until the last minute of the movie, only then revealing that the dead body in the center of the room is Jigsaw/John Kramer who was only shown on screen for 3-4 seconds as an introduction to Lawrence and his job. The twist provides this moment after the film is over that leaves you staring at your blank TV screen following the ending thinking to yourself ‘what the fuck…’. The movie is not a masterpiece as I mentioned earlier, but its flawless execution of making a story compelling and shocking to the very end is brilliant and deserves recognition.