118 min | R | September 29, 2023 | Lionsgate
John Kramer is dying of cancer and flies to Mexico for an experimental cure that turns out to be a scam. The con artists picked the wrong terminal patient. Jigsaw does not file complaints.
John Kramer hears about a radical procedure that can stop the brain cancer killing him. He travels to Mexico City, pays in full, and wakes up to discover the clinic was a fraud and the doctors were grifters who prey on the desperate. This is the first Saw film that asks you to want its killer to win. The movie strips away the franchise’s usual lattice of detectives and timelines and builds itself instead around one dying man’s grief and rage. The traps are no longer the point. The man building them is.
Tobin Bell finally gets to play John Kramer as a lead instead of a specter on a tape recorder. He spends the first act sick and quiet, and Bell lets the desperation read in small gestures before the violence starts. Shawnee Smith returns as Amanda Young and plays her as a loyal disciple whose devotion is also a wound she cannot close. Synnøve Macody Lund plays Cecilia Pederson, the clinic’s smiling architect, with a brittle confidence that curdles into terror. Steven Brand makes Parker Sears slippery and self-serving. The supporting con artists, Gabriela and Diego and Mateo, exist mostly to be tested, and the actors give them enough fear to make the testing land.
Kevin Greutert directs from a script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, and he understands that the dread works better when the audience is invested in the victims as people first. The Mexico City setting gives cinematographer a warm, sun-bleached palette that sits against the franchise’s usual industrial green. Greutert holds his shots longer than the series convention allows. He lets the camera linger on faces deciding whether to cut into their own bodies. The traps are mechanically inventive, but the editing refuses to cut away at the moment of choice, which is where the cruelty actually lives.
This is the rare late-franchise entry that justifies its own existence by going backward instead of forward. Greutert and his writers stop treating John Kramer as a puzzle to be explained and start treating him as a man to be understood. The film does not redeem him. It makes his logic legible, which is more disturbing than redemption would be. By grounding the gore in genuine grief, Saw X turns a series running on autopilot back into something with a pulse.