James Wan
Saw - L'enigmista

Darkness, a man regains consciousness in a filthy bathtub. The man is named Adam Faulkner, a photographer, and together with Dr. Lawrence Gordon, he has been kidnapped for no apparent reason. Adding to the complexity of the situation is the presence of a corpse with a shattered head and a gun in hand placed between the two men. However, the doubts last a short time; Lawrence is indeed the first to intuit the identity of their captor. His name is John Kramer, but he has become known to the public as the Jigsaw Killer; John is a serial killer but a serial killer sui generis. He kidnaps his victims and subjects them to absurd trials, but it would be more correct to call them games with the precise aim of making them understand the real value of life, towards which they have behaved unjustly. In fact, he never commits the act of murder himself; it is the victims who inflict death upon themselves once the game is over precisely because they have not been able to complete it correctly. The two protagonists now understand the gravity of the situation they are in; the Jigsaw Killer wants to test Lawrence. He must kill Adam within eight hours; if he succeeds, he will be free; if he fails, his family will be killed.

It would be a crime to continue telling the story of a film that deserves to be savored not only for its masterful screenplay organized around a plot that is both simple and original precisely because of its brutal simplicity. Saw is indeed the manifesto of a new approach to the horror film, an approach tied closely to a low-budget philosophy and indie, to use a musical term. The money invested in the film was on the order of thousands of dollars, with a commercial return in terms of revenue and publicity much greater than any horror organized with blockbuster-level budgets. The film is then organized, strangely enough, not on splatter elements (the only scene close to this style involves the two protagonists and a saw, and the tortures of the serial killer's previous victims are only mentioned briefly) but on continuous tension that accompanies the viewer from the first to the last minute until developing a real sense of empathy with the protagonists as if he himself were subjected to one of the many games of the Jigsaw Killer.

The same Jigsaw Killer is a film villain unique in his genre. John Kramer does not act irrationally or driven by some basic impulse like revenge; he has a goal that could almost be defined as benevolent, he wishes to improve his victims by preventing them from committing past mistakes. He even possesses a moral code that leads him to provide them with all the means to save themselves; it is up to the "players" to use them in the most suitable way to gain freedom. The Jigsaw Killer will therefore go down in history as the villain of the '00s, as the one who will reside in our nightmares for a long time, taking the place left vacant by characters like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, but above all, he will go down in history as the anti-hero of one of the best horror films of the last 10 years.