Saw X. MA15+, 118 minutes. Three stars.
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Ten films in and the franchise of Saw films, brainchild of Aussie wunderkinds James Wan and Leigh Whannell, continues to surprise.
On one level, that surprise is for the buckets of gore spilled across the torture porn that tries to be more inventive as the horror films progress, sometimes successfully.
But the real surprise is that every now and then, not every time mind you, the franchise spits out a real gem, a film that surprises and entertains throughout, and Saw X is one of those gems.
The premise of each film is that a handful of characters awake to find themselves trapped within some eerie space, each hooked up to a different torture device that has some means of escape built into it. The escape usually comes at a high personal cost, such as the saw that gives the film franchise its name, placed in front of a victim allowing him to cut off the limb he is chained to his torture device with.
The bad guy of the film franchise is, spoiler, Tobin Bell's John Kramer.
Most Boomers use their retirement years going on motorbike holidays or writing angry letters to their local newspaper, but this former engineer is making the most of his retirement putting those construction skills to use.
His victims are never innocent, and he often constructs their torture device as a moral lesson, but Kramer exited the series when his character died in Saw III (again, spoilers, sorry).
This being the movies, the filmmakers did a little engineering of their own, inventing ways for Kramer to return from the dead.
This time around, they do so by setting the film a handful of months before the first Saw film.
John Kramer (Bell) has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, but a friend from his patient support group (Michael Beach) seems to make a miraculous recovery, offering a glimmer of hope.
Kramer is introduced to Dr Cecilia Pederson (Synnove Macody Lund), a medical entrepreneur whose father pioneered groundbreaking cancer treatment that no country would approve, so she runs an off-the-radar underground clinic.
He signs himself up for the expensive treatment, travels to Mexico and meets the team at the medical facility, including housekeeper Gabriela (Renata Vaca), nurse Valentina (Paulette Hernandez), anaesthesiologist Diego (Joshua Okamoto), and another cancer patient, Parker (Steven Brand).
The treatment seems to have gone well, however all is not what it seems, and when Kramer discovers this, well, you probably don't want to be on the bad side of the man otherwise known as the Jigsaw Killer, a killer with a monumental headache.
Fans of the Saw films will appreciate the back-to-basics that this film's second half represents, but I really enjoyed the film's first half.
Who expects so much sunshine and colourful Mexican culture in a horror film? I certainly didn't and I felt my fondness for this character and these films rekindled by the change of locale. Many will have no interest in horror, nor in picking up a film series 10 films in, but this is actually a great place for a newbie to start, perhaps moving on after this to the first Saw.
The production design in the torture chamber is as grim and darkly lit as in previous films, but I appreciated what I felt was a nod to Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Juenet's The City of Lost Children in the design of the torture machinery.
Bell has aged across the 19 years since Saw hit our screens in 2004, and it gives a wonderful physicality to this quiet, broken man. Between Bell's performance and Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger's screenplay, we feel empathy and root for this genuine bad guy, and I enjoyed being so cleverly gaslit.
