I want to play a game

Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d always thought of the Saw films as a trashy ripoff of Se7en. As if there were a pitch meeting where someone said, “What if we got to see what happens to the victims as they were gruesomely tortured instead of arriving on the scene after the fact?”

     This summer the Saw franchise returns with the reboot, Saw IX. And no, although it doesn’t play out during a constant downpour of rain, it reminded me of Se7en for a different reason: it plays out as a straight police procedural.

Spiral (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman) cobbles from only the finest narrative mechanisms found in the entries preceding it. And it manages to build a lean, fresh working model that packs a wallop of a punch.

     Around Saw III (2006, Bousman), the plotlines get messy. It begins with the parallel plotlines—with the twist that sometimes it’s revealed that various narratives occurred earlier or later in time than we were led to presume. Which, okay yeah, can be a lot of fun too though. Specifically, I’m thinking of Saw III with JEFF, the alcoholic dad who lost his kid, wandering through Jigsaw’s labyrinth; and amid so many other arcs and characters we kind of forget about him. Then at the end of Saw IV (2007, Bousman), when STROM finally finds the room he thinks the other cops are in, he walks in on Jeff and holy crap that’s so cool! I was like huh? You think all that stuff happened long ago and Jigsaw’s dead, but Strom walks in on Jeff? Amazing.

     Okay, back to Spiral. Its narrative starts with a clean slate. All of the characters are new. And there aren’t any concurrent subplots with characters in their own arcs. Spiral is about ZEKE (Chris Rock) and no one else. Mmm, there are a few flashbacks, but with the desaturated pallet they’re easy to follow and identify where they fit the chronology—the cheap fake mustaches on Samuel L. Jackson and Rock’s lame goatee are maybe a little unnecessary but I appreciate the respect to clarity.

     

     In closing, my favorite new touch is the Jigsaw voice. (Or I should say the voice of the antagonist, because in Spiral, they avoid playing that old game of bringing JOHN KRAMER back.) The new antagonist voice is like really creepy because it’s so artificial non-human sounding. I wish I could better describe it, but my point is I find it genuinely unsettling, unlike Tobin Bell’s voice which has become overused to the point of caricature.

 

5/15/2021 AMC Madison Yards 8

Atlanta, GA

DCP