A Film Canon

The Saw franchise turns on a chilling thought-experiment - how far somebody might be prepared to torture themselves, in order to avoid or allay further torture - but the first film is the only one to translate it into something like a psychological thriller, rather than the more straightforward torture porn of the later sequels. This is both a blessing and a curse - on the one hand, it draws out the peculiar originality of Jigsaw, who's less a killer than an enabler, less a masked figure than a puppeteer, and whose spree is about forcing his victims to enjoy and appreciate life more, just as the film makes its audience appreciate the fact that they don't have to be experiencing it indefinitely, that it has an end - and this identification between the self-torture of Jigsaw's victims and the self-torture of any viewer prepared to sit through the film pre-empts the common criticism that the series is sadistic, since it's just this masochistic viewing experience it seems keen to solicit, encouraging the viewer to understand extreme nausea as an aesthetic category, a source of delayed pleasure rather than displeasure. What prevents it being a truly brilliant psychological thriller, and the most unnerving chamber drama since Cube, is that director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell simply don't do psychological suspense particularly well - or, rather, try to imbue it with the very depth that Jigsaw so studiously avoids, and that the concluding twist so delightfully implodes, meaning that what should be a charming amateur veneer occasionally verges on pretension, grudging pleasure to its audience with the bad faith of a self-appointed auteur making the token genre film necessary to elevate himself to stardom. In particular, the opening premise - two men, chained to opposite sides of a room, with a dead body between - is quickly subordinated to a whole proliferation of backstories and subplots whose kinetic energy not only jars with the cool, studied parameters of the room, but subsumes all the visceral intensity that should be reserved for it. In this way, it prevents the most promising element of the film - the room as a synecdoche for all the subsequent instruments of torture in the series, something you have to use against yourself to escape from - from coming to fruition and, again, dilutes the revelation that this torture machine has been digital all along, driven by simultaneity more than suspense, by space-time rather than space and time, as well as the accompanying realisation that all we're anticipating seeing is simply all we've already seen. From this perspective, the graphic extremity of the sequels isn't even necessary to restore torture as past tense, rather than present tension, or to bleed dismemberment into rememberment, with the result that those sequels all feel strangely anterior to this original film, positioning it somewhere between a prequel and a version of Jigsaw's self-defeating narratives of origin or explanation, as if the franchise were best grasped when watched backwards, just as the closing film - Saw 3D - opens with a dimensionally-restored flashforward to the first.