Jigsaw-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: The serial killer known as Jigsaw has been dead for ten years. But when killings around the city mimic Jigsaw's methods, a question arises: is Jigsaw alive? 

John Kramer aka Jigsaw is back...or is he?

The movie seems routine at first. People are captured and are coerced into making difficult choices. The police are mystified, however. Jigsaw has been dead for ten years so how did his DNA end up under a victim’s fingernails.

Honestly, I thought it was going to be a case of deus ex machina and the answer was going to be ridiculously cheesy. When the climax occurred, I was taken aback. The movie that I thought was cliched and guessable, turned out to have a decent surprising twist. Piece by piece, everything starts to make sense.

JIGSAW Movie Plot 

A man is found holding a trigger by the police. He is shot before he could divulge any details. Cut to a scene in a creepy locked room where five people are chained with metal buckets on their heads. They are awakened when the chains pull them toward circular rotating saws. A hint is given and one of them realizes that if they sacrifice a bit of blood, they would be let go. She lets the saw cut the skin of her arm and quickly warns the others. One, however, is barely conscious and is hurtled toward the saws. But that is not his fate.

Spoiler alert! He survives and is part of Jigsaw’s twisted game.

The rest of them are put to test and have to admit their sins in order to find a cure and escape from their captivity. As it turns out, all of them have done deplorable things and in Jigsaw’s mind, deserve to be punished in the same way they committed a sin against their victims.

Two of them have actually, unknowingly hurt Jigsaw personally. One of them sold a faulty bike to Jigsaw’s nephew which caused his death. Jigsaw serves his version of justice, the guy is killed by a motorcycle. The purse snatcher is killed by not getting the right antidote on time, the same way she accidentally killed her victim by stealing her purse which contained life-saving medication.

The heroine who was supposed to be smart has an even terrible secret within her. She deliberately caused the death of her newborn and blamed it on her husband who went mad and killed himself. How did Jigsaw know this? He was her neighbor.

While all this is going on, the police deal with a startling revelation that puts the coroners under suspicion only because they both seem to be interested in Jigsaw’s so-called experiments. In one scene, the doctor is shown bare-backed and we see multiple crisscrossed scars. Clearly, it wasn’t accidental.

JIGSAW Ending Explained with Spoilers! 

Soon, the twist is revealed and I was actually surprised by it. Turns out, Jigsaw is dead after all. The people who were trying to outlast each other in the sick competition were doing so ten years ago. The bucket guy who was never identified was the doctor who had wronged John Kramer by misdiagnosing him.

But Jigsaw forgives him, by saying that his mistake wasn’t as big as the others and it was accidental. Okay, that part I didn’t actually digest, but I was still too taken by the twist.

The doctor had concocted this whole charade-- the stolen DNA, the dead bodies, etc, to lure the detective who had let criminals go. One of the said criminals had murdered the doctor’s wife- the man shown at the beginning of the movie.

All of it has been a ploy of the doctor who wanted the evil to be punished and decided that Jigsaw’s method did make a lot of sense, to the point that he becomes his apprentice.

In the end, more blood is splashed, more flesh is torn and the detective meets his demise while the doctor walks away with a clever smirk.

All in all, the movie does have some interesting parts, and of course, I liked the twist of the time jump. The frightening scenes weren’t as intense as they could be, but in the end, the pawns didn’t matter. The main pieces, the characters—Jigsaw, the coroner and the detective, their story was much more interesting than the sick games being played.

Scary scale: 3/5