DARE YOU SEE SAW
I’d like one ticket to see Saw please
I saw Saw last night.
The film is as sophisticated as the gleeful half jokes made out of talking about it. Ie not very, but wonderfully direct. I do not think that I have seen a more narrative based puzzler this year. A serial killer mystery told from the perspective of two of his victims, it reels out its backstory, and then its current story making seemingly unforgivable mistakes (you get just too long a glimpse of the killers face…). These make you feel clever and dissatisfied that you have worked it out long before you are supposed to. You haven’t. Saw is remarkably clever in its remarkable dumbness.
As for the Saw. Well it is a bit of let down. In a film that seems happy to gorge itself on sped up, hyper-kinetic camera effects, it completely lets itself down on the much more useful staple of sound effects. The audience know what the saw is for from the moment it appears, and luckily the films surfeit of narrative means that we are often distracted away from its presence. But when it finally comes into play, it almost works as comedy. Still for a really good, really satisfying story Saw is one of the best I have seen in a long time. You even forgive the arbitrary after-the-fact plot inconsistencies, because it entertained so much at the time.