Saw X review: "Tobin Bell's comeback isn't sufficient X-cuse to resuscitate the series"

With its starry leads, bravura ending and socio-political subtext, 2021’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw represented a positive step forward for a franchise built on grungy gorno. With Saw X, alas, it’s back to the basement, both literally and figuratively.

Setting the action between the original Saw and Saw 2 lets director Kevin Greutert revive John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer (Tobin Bell) after his too-hasty exit in Saw 3. This, though, constitutes the solitary innovation in a film that combines what we’ve come to expect (grisly unpleasantness, ludicrously elaborate death-traps) with some things we haven’t (laborious scene-setting, sickly sentimentality).

Discovered at the outset in the throes of terminal cancer, the resurrected Kramer flies to Mexico in the hope of undergoing radical life-saving treatment. Yet he eventually realizes (long after the audience) he’s been cynically duped: all the reason he needs to wreak bloody revenge on sleek fraudster Cecilia (Synnøve Macody Lund) and her team of expendable underlings.

The fiendish contraptions Kramer and another returning party prepare for them demand a series of set-piece self-surgeries, staged with ghoulish aplomb. The bits in between, though, are talky and dreary, characteristics shared by a lackluster performance from Bell that suggests his killer was better off lurking in the shadows. 

An early sequence involving snapped digits and sucked-out eyeballs is an outrageous cheat, while giving John a local lad to care about is a preposterously mawkish embellishment. Two decades on from the short that started everything, X must surely mark the spot Jigsaw finally rests in pieces.

Saw X is released in US and UK cinemas on September 29. For more upcoming movies, check out our guides to 2023 movie release dates.