"Saw"'s just the trick for celebrating Halloween, providing you're not one of those benighted souls who smugly diss the pleasures of horror movies. A smart, gruesome, psychologically harrowing puzzle piece, this low (low) budget debut by two Australian film-school grads - director-writer James Wan and cowriter-costar Leigh Whannell - just plain crackles with talent and originality.
Back in the '40s, Hollywood producer Val Lewton showed how to make scarily poetic horror movies ("Cat People," "I Walked with a Zombie") on a dime. Proving that less can be more in a genre that thrives on suggestive shadowplay, he demonstrated that only poverty-stricken imaginations are handicapped by having to shoot on the cheap. Bloated budgets can't guarantee cinematic gold; witness recent dud "Van Helsing."
Young Wan and Whannell are true Lewtonians: It was their budget limitations that spawned the idea of setting this nasty little horrorshow primarily in a single location, an abandoned, filthy public restroom, inhabited by two chained men who don't know how they came to be there - and one very bloody corpse splayed out on the floor between them. What the filmmakers wanted was a world "drenched in rust"; production designer Julie Berghoff delivered that eroded environment in spades.
One of the manacled men is a complacent surgeonpretty much out of emotional touch with himself, his wife and patients - everyone but his little daughter. He's played by Cary Elwes. Even in "The Princess Bride," Elwes' Troy Donahue good looks seemed too good to be true, verging on suspect; the advent of middle age has softened the jawline, puffed the eyes enough to signal serious moral decay. Adam (Leigh Whannell), the other prisoner, is a fresh-faced kid who calls a dreary walk-up home and takes pictures for a meager living.
And who's the fellow sprawled in the great pool of drying blood? A taped voice, monstrously flat, IDs him as the casualty of an earlier killer scenario: poisoned, he shot himself to put a period to his pain. Now, per instructions of the mysterious "director," the surgeon must murder the kid by 6 - or it's lights out for his wife and child. For the disembodied presence behind the camera in the crumbling bathroom wall, it's "reality TV," extreme lessons to live, or die, by. For the two men chained on opposite sides of this dank arena, each armed with saws, it's slow but sure devolution into primal savagery.
In the decaying nether regions of a City of Dreadful Night - dark hole-in-the-wall offices and rented rooms, hallways, basements, underground parking lots, warehouses -"Saw"'s Jigsaw Killer dreams diabolical snuff films, drawing both victims and police, especially hapless homicide detective Danny Glover, into voyeurism. He turns them into helpless couch potatoes in thrall to his bizarre nightmares (scored with perfectly metallic menace by Charlie Clouser, producer of Nine Inch Nails).
"Saw"'s narrative spoor draws you ever deeper, into Chinese boxes within Chinese boxes. Flashbacks - sometimes inside flashbacks - show us a whole string of grisly "video games" designed by a serial killer who drives his victims to use their wits to break out of his Dantean deathtraps. A would-be suicide who once slashed his wrists must worm his way through a roomful of razor wire before an exit door slams shut forever. A young woman (Shawnee Smith), addicted to drugs, finds her jaws locked into a metal contraption with the look of a medieval torture device. The grotesque, white-faced puppet (straight out of one of Jan Svankmajer's skin-crawling animations) on a nearby TV screen warns her that the thing will explode her face if she doesn't find the key that can free her. How and where she finds that key doubly damns her consumerist, orally gratifying fix on staying alive.
That the killer is writing sermons in guilty flesh is never laid on with a thematic trowel by Wan and Whannell; it's simply icing on a totally engrossing piece of cinematic terror. These boyos from Down Under put the pedal to the metal from the very first shot - looking up through the murky water of a bathroom tub, your eyes trying desperately to steady the picture, the plot, above - to the last: a door sliding shut, a visual wipe, ending us in impotent darkness. Throughout, our nerves are wracked by that peculiarly debilitating stress generated by not being able to see clearly, not being able to read existential sign. (And I'm not referring to that tiresome cliché of contemporary horror movies, the shocking assault from an unexpected angle after the threat seems to have passed.)
"Saw" discombobulates brilliantly by blurring linear chronology, breaking down the comforting third wall between hungry-eyed audience and theater of blood, and firing fast-action effects and shock cuts to create stunning, almost graphic novel-like imagery. Not the kind of movie that you can watch with your body and brain dialed down to supine, "Saw" draws blood if you let down your guard.
This is a horror movie that bites back, tapping the same vein as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's eminently creepy flickers. Though Wan/Whannell name David Lynch and Dario Argento as their primary influences (and the style of David Fincher's "Se7en" is certainly conjured here), one of the most disquieting shots in the film might well be a Kurosawa hommage, specifically "Pulse": In the circle of a distorting mirror in a dim parking garage we see the door of the car below slowly open, seemingly without human agency. Then there's movement below the door, but difficult to pin down, wrong somehow, as though something boneless or broken were angling, unfolding into partial view. The effect, like glimpsing some malevolently purposeful alien stain, is chilling, maybe even a little nauseating.
Brave "Saw" for high-voltage suspense, intelligent terror and the blackest of humor. Check out Wan and Whannell while they're new to the movie game, fairly jittering and afire with raw talent. All too soon Hollywood will homogenize them.
[[In-content Ad]]
