REVIEW #316 Saw X (2023)

John Kramer, searching for a miracle cure for his tumour travels to Mexico in one last hope. However when things aren’t as they seemed, Kramer finds a new purpose and new victims.

I found myself enjoying Saw X much more than I thought I would, enjoying the morality dilemma, that is of course layered throughout the franchise, but this one in particular played on my mind a lot more. Scammers targeting the terminally ill in the hope to steal the last thing the victims have left… their money. That’s a sickening act and Kramer presents the audience with a deep test of morality, do these people deserve his wrath? His wrath is clearly to the absolute extreme so I’d hope most audiences would conclude that they didn’t deserve what happened to them. But I appreciated how each victim’s involvement and reasoning for their crimes varied, which meant we would have to evaluate each of them and through that process, our sympathy would vary with each character. That sort of deep level thinking is something I did not expect to experience with a Saw film. But that being said, I have only seen about 2/3 of them, so who am I to judge!

The first part of the movie is a little slow as it sets up the motives for John Kramer and then it picks up the pace a little during the middle act. The ‘games’ (traps) were still brutal and at times very gory, although I don’t think it was as bad as I remembered other instalments to be. Unfortunately I thought I could get away with not watching all of the others in order to fully understand this one, so I went against my better judgement and watched it anyway (which I never do, if I haven’t seen all of the predecessors). It still made sense, although I didn’t recognise the cameos, it didn’t make much difference I guess but I’ll definitely have to go on a saw marathon now. Saw X is definitely worth the watch, they will never be Oscar worthy horrors but it’s always a reliable instalment to the genre, watchable and audiences know exactly what to get, with a few little surprises along the way.

Overall (7/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan