Deliriously inventive and sadistically cruel, Saw breathes new life into the serial killer genre with an ingenious set-up. Two men (CaryElwes and Leigh Whannell) wake up in a windowless bathroom, shackled at opposite ends of the room. A tape-recorded voice tells that them one of them will have to kill the other in the next eight hours, or they’ll both die. There’s just one snag: the only way to get out of their manacles is to use a hacksaw on their ankles...
Unlike its most obvious influence, David Fincher’s bleakly moralistic Se7en, Saw’s a movie without mainstream crossover appeal. No pretty boy actors like Brad Pitt here, just an uncomfortably intense two-hander in which the unwilling captives - Dr Gordon (Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) -try to figure out what’s going on, and a series of carefully managed flashbacks in which Danny Glover’s plodding copper tracks a psycho known as The Jigsaw Killer. It’s a horror movie for genre aficionados who like their scares sparse, stripped down and illuminated by nothingbut flickering neon strip lights.