Saw X is a 2023 American horror film directed by Kevin Greutert and written by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger. The film is the tenth installment overall in the Saw film series, serving as both a direct sequel to Saw (2004) and a prequel to Saw II (2005), starring Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith who reprise their roles from the previous films, acting alongside Synnøve Macody Lund, Steven Brand, Renata Vaca, and Michael Beach, who play new characters. The film sees John Kramer (Bell) travelling to Mexico in hopes that an experimental procedure may cure him. John later discovers that the operation is a scam, prompting him to kidnap those responsible and subject them to his trademark death traps as retribution.
A tenth franchise installment was reported to be in development with Twisted Pictures in April 2021, when Stolberg and Goldfinger, writers for the previous two entries of the series, announced that they had completed the script in December 2021. Greutert, who had directed two other installments of the series and edited six, was also confirmed as the film's director. Filming took place from October 2022 to February 2023 in Mexico City, making the film the first in the franchise to be filmed outside Toronto since the original Saw.
Saw X was theatrically released by Lionsgate Films on September 29, 2023. It has grossed $101 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise especially towards Bell's performance, becoming the best reviewed Saw film.
Plot[]
| Spoiler Warning: The following contains important plot details of the entire film. |
John Kramer is told he has only months to live due to advanced brain cancer. He attends a cancer support meeting and meets Henry Kessler, who asserts he has been cured by an experimental Norwegian cancer treatment conducted by a group led by Dr. Pederson. A desperate John contacts the doctor's daughter Cecilia, who refers him to her clinic outside Mexico City.
On arrival in Mexico, John is taken to the clinic in a van so that he is unaware of its secret location. He meets Cecilia and her team—Mateo, Valentina, and Dr. Cortez—patients Gabriela and Parker Sears, and the caretaker's young son Carlos, whom he bonds with. John goes under for surgery and awakens to Cecilia telling him that he is now cancer-free. Finding a new lease on life, he purchases a gift for Gabriela; however, upon returning to the clinic, he finds it abandoned and realizes the entire operation was a scam.
Deducing that Dr. Cortez was actually his taxi driver Diego in disguise, John kidnaps and interrogates him. He sews pipe bombs on Diego's arms, telling him to remove them by cutting through his flesh, which Diego successfully performs. Jigsaw's apprentice Amanda Young kidnaps Cecilia, Mateo, Valentina, and Gabriela. They wake up in the clinic, now subjects of John's Jigsaw games.
Valentina is tasked with severing her leg with a Gigli sawand extracting enough bone marrow to release a key to free herself. She successfully amputates her leg but is unable to collect enough marrow, and a second Gigli saw decapitates her. Cecilia uses Valentina's intestines as a rope to retrieve her phone and call for help. Amanda confiscates the phone.
Parker breaks into the clinic, demanding his money back. Amanda restrains him while Mateo is forced to drill into his own skull and remove a piece of cerebral tissue to dissolve in a test tube and obtain a key. Although he successfully performs the task, the tissue fails to dissolve in time, and a heated mask closes over his face, killing him. Next, Gabriela is suspended from shackles and subjected to ionizing radiation, tasked with freeing herself by using a sledgehammer to break her shackled limbs. She succeeds but before Amanda can take her to the hospital for her injuries, Parker forces them at gunpoint to release Cecilia.
Cecilia kills Gabriela by breaking her neck and reveals she called Parker, who is part of the scam, to free her. She forces John to chain himself into the trap meant for her; when she hears Carlos outside, she takes the child and chains him opposite John. The trap begins to waterboard them with blood. Parker and Cecilia leave to retrieve their bag of stolen cash from John's control room but activate a tripwire, sealing them both in the room and freeing John and Carlos. John reveals Diego outed all of the scammers—including Parker and Henry—and that he tricked Cecilia into luring Parker. A deadly chemical gas begins filling the room, with the only respite being a ventilation hole large enough for one person's head, forcing Cecilia and Parker to fight each other. Cecilia kills Parker but can only watch as John, Amanda, and Carlos leave the facility, deserting her.
Sometime later, Henry awakens in a dilapidated bathroom with a new trap strapped to his stomach, overseen by John and Mark Hoffman.
| Spoiler Warning: All spoilers have been stated and have ended here. |
Cast[]
- Tobin Bell as John Kramer
- Shawnee Smith as Amanda Young
- Synnøve Macody Lund as Cecilia Pederson
- Steven Brand as Parker Sears
- Renata Vaca as Gabriela
- Joshua Okamoto as Diego
- Octavio Hinojosa as Mateo
- Paulette Hernández as Valentina
- Jorge Briseño as Carlos
- Costas Mandylor as Mark Hoffman
- Michael Beach as Henry Kessler
- Isan Beomhyun Lee as a custodian
- David Alfano as a doctor
- Katie Barberi as the cancer support group leader
- Lucía Gómez Robledo as an MRI technician
- Donagh Gordon as Dr. Finn Pederson
Production[]
Development[]
In April 2021, a tenth film installment to the Saw franchise, titled Saw X, was confirmed to be in development with Twisted Pictures. However, Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021), which released the following month, stated that it was a premature announcement that surprised him and the film's producers, saying: "Just because we made Spiral doesn't mean Saw ceases to exist. Just because Spiral is here, that doesn't mean there won't be a Saw IX. This [Spiral] is not the ninth film in the Saw franchise. There easily could be a Saw IX that follows Jigsaw. I think they're waiting to see how Spiral goes and how audiences respond to determine what happens next."
Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, writers for the previous two entries of the series, Jigsaw (2017) and Spiral, confirmed the script was completed in December 2021. Producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules had planned the story of Saw X since 2018, but plans for the film were put on hold when Michael Burns, the Vice President of Lionsgate, met with Chris Rock in Brazil and approved his pitch for Spiral. That film's box office under-performance led Burg and Koules to go back to the franchise's roots for its tenth installment and make the story they had planned. In August 2022, Bloody Disgusting reported the film would be directed by Kevin Greutert, who previously helmed Saw VI (2009) and Saw 3D (2010).
Casting[]
In October 2022, Tobin Bell was confirmed to reprise the role of John Kramer / Jigsaw. Greutert told Empire that Bell is featured in the film more than any other in the series. Bell was also involved in the film's script and post-production, coming up with extra dialogue that was incorporated into the story after shooting concluded. In December 2022, Synnøve Macody Lund, Steven Brand and Michael Beach joined the cast in undisclosed roles. Shawnee Smith reprises her role as Amanda Young. That same month, Renata Vaca, Paulette Hernande, Joshua Okamoto, and Octavio Hinojosa were cast in undisclosed roles. While never officially announced, Costas Mandylor returned with a surprise cameo of his role as Mark Hoffman, though his return was implied by his voice present in the trailer. Greutert told Entertainment Weekly that this cameo was "the most fan-servicey thing" he has done.
Filming[]
Principal photography took place from late October 2022 to February 2023 in Mexico City on a budget of $13 million. This location was a departure from the previous eight films which were all filmed in Toronto, excluding the first film in the series, Saw (2004), which was filmed in Los Angeles. The trap designs were more complex than in previous installments, so the filming schedule was split into two parts—three weeks in November and three weeks in January. Greutert told SFX, "We had to make so many prosthetics and machines, and over Christmas, we spent the entirety of it figuring this stuff out".
At the Midsummer Scream 2023 convention, cinematographer Nick Matthews said they wanted to pay homage to the earlier Saw films. He explained, "I think for Kevin and I, it was really important that we were able to pay homage to all the early films, we love that the early films are [1.85] (ratio), we love that they're textural, that they're gritty, that there's these really bold, yellow color palettes, and we want to do our work to hearken to that, with pervasive darkness, and really throwing the audience subjectively right into this graphic, gritty world". Production designer Anthony Stabley looked back at the color palette from those mid-2000s films and ensured that all technology, like graphics, seen in Saw X would have been available when those films took place.
Post-production[]
Most of the gore was done with practical effects, with CGI only being used for touch-ups. The filmmakers considered the use of visual effects to de-age Bell and Smith due to the 17-year gap between their appearances in Saw III (2006) - in which their characters both died - and Saw X. However, they decided against it; Greutert expressed his support for this decision, saying that "some of the films that have de-aged their actors, it puts some distance between the character and the audience", feeling that Bell and Smith have some emotional close-ups that should not be altered.
Steve Forn, the film's first assistant editor, had local police called on him during an editing session involving sound design of the custodian's trap— and "naturally, there's a lot of screaming in the sequence." The police, to quote the neighbors, had concerns about [someone] being tortured to death in here, to which Forn replies with "Actually, I'm just working on a movie. You can come in and see it if you want?" The police laughed, saying "We want to but, you know, you're all right".
Marketing[]
On September 9, 2023, Lionsgate announced the return of the Saw Blood Drive, a promotional event allowing audiences to donate blood to the American Red Cross in exchange for free tickets to the opening weekend of Saw X.
On September 13, 2023, a parody of the Nicole Kidman AMC Theatres commercial was published to YouTube and to Lionsgate's social media platforms. It featured a remote-controlled Billy the Puppet on a tricycle in place of Kidman, with some slight changes to reflect the graphic nature of Saw. While the parody was met with humorous responses by news outlets, it was pulled from Lionsgate's accounts due to a cease and desist order by AMC Theatres. Writer Josh Stolberg released a statement on the trailer's takedown, calling people "lucky" if they managed to watch the parody before its removal, though re-uploads have spread across multiple channels not affiliated with Lionsgate.
Release[]
Saw X was released theatrically in the United States by Lionsgate Films on September 29, 2023. The film was set to be released on October 27, 2023, opposite Five Nights at Freddy's, before Lionsgate announced at the San Diego Comic-Con that it would be moved up to its current date.
Box office[]
As of November 12, 2023, Saw X has grossed $53.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $48 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $101.5 million.
In the United States and Canada, Saw X was released alongside The Creator, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, and the wide expansion of Dumb Money, and was projected to gross $15–18 million from 3,262 theaters in its opening weekend. It made $8 million on its first day, including $2 million from Thursday night previews. It went onto debut to $18.3 million, finishing second behind PAW Patrol. It was below the average opening weekend of the franchise ($23 million), but higher than recent installments Spiral ($8.8 million in 2021) and Jigsaw ($16.6 million in 2017). The film made $8.2 million in its second weekend and $5.7 million in its third, finishing in third and fourth place, respectively.
The film topped the box office in the United Kingdom and Ireland, grossing $2.31 million in the first three days.
Reception[]
The film garnered positive reception from critics, who praised Bell's performance, adding that it was the best entry in the franchise since the first film. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 80% of 147 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Led by a franchise-best performance by Tobin Bell, Saw X reinvigorates the series with an installment that has a surprising amount of heart to go with all the gore." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 60 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. It is the highest-rated film of the franchise on both websites, respectively topping the first (50%) and third film (48 out of 100). Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while those polled at PostTrak gave it an 82% overall positive score, with 62% saying they would definitely recommend the film.
Videos[]
