Saw X (2023) (Review)

Saw X (2023) There it is! I’ve seen it!!! Before seeing this tenth opus, I watched a video that gave a quick summary of the other episodes. Yes, it’s almost a complete series…. Which I hope will only be one season, since it’s already ten times too many!

I’m happy to announce that I’m finally going to give Saw just one star!
I’d love to put less.

This time, the cup is full.
The previous film, the ninth, had raised the bar a little. But at the same time, it didn’t have much to do with the others!

This time, I definitely get the impression that we’re being taken for fools.
We’re led to believe that it’s subtle, but it’s not.

At the beginning, they always show a really disgusting scene to show the audience where they are, to announce the color (always red, of course!), so that they don’t think they’re in front of a good thriller.

Dead characters come back. And, of course, we can always say that this episode comes after the first Saw, which in turn came after Jigsaw (the eighth), but to be so complicated, all these films would have to be masterpieces. But only the first can be called such. They’ve all degraded over time.

Incredible to think that it will be 20 years, in 2024, that we’ll be talking about these films that shocked, challenged, interested… but which were also the beginning of the true decline of horror cinema.

Of course, I’m not talking for the degenerate teenagers who are craving sensation and can’t feel anything in their already damaged bodies, whose brains must smell rotten.

That said, it’s always a pleasure to meet up with John Kramer (played by the excellent Tobin Bell), aka the puzzle killer. Here, we think the film might spare us the worst and take a more decent path with real suspense. The first half-hour suggests that this is going to be an operational film with a real message.
Alas, after the great betrayal, the killer rediscovers his motives and decides to take revenge in what he believes is the cruelest, but also the most intelligent, way.

It has to be said that the idea of a man who is condemned to die by disease, while he sees so many odious characters around him having the good life, isn’t bad at all.

Of course, there are mistakes and inconsistencies. When a woman tells the killer “You’ve been doing these things for a long time (years)!”, it’s implied that this is the tenth film and, as a result, it doesn’t really take into account that this is only the third opus.

The first Saw is the only one that can’t just be called torture porn. It’s also a crime thriller. That would be like calling the first Alien just a horror movie, when it’s also a thriller and science fiction.

Nothing to Saw…ver (= to save in french, with a little play on words) about this film.
You can, without further ado, throw it away or avoid it.

My Rating