Mark Reviews Movies: SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021

The awkwardly titled Spiral: From the Book of Saw (It's all about marketing) is indeed a new entry in the Saw franchise. For those who somehow avoided or have forgotten the previous installments, it's a horror series that gained its fame from gruesome scenes of torture, portrayed as elaborate games of survival and "morality" staged by a serial killer (despite his protests against the label) and his line of apprentices. It also became the horror equivalent of a soap opera, with its many twists, its multiple betrayals, its heavy reliance on exposition, and a timeline so convoluted that the assorted screenwriters were able to have the villain, who died in the third movie and whose autopsy opened the fourth one, in all of the series' eight entries.

Jigsaw, as the murderer was called, doesn't appear in this one (although Jigsaw actor Tobin Bell's headshots do decorate a board at one point), and that's all that legally can be said about the identity of the killer in this new installment (Non-disclosure agreements are the real killer—at least of critical analysis). That frees this installment of a lot of baggage: toying with the audience about Jigsaw's condition, all of the melodramatic nonsense about his feuding disciples, and the ever-entangled web of the series' chronology. Director Darren Lynn Bousman's movie still has plenty of baggage, though—some of it old and some of it new.

Bousman, by the way, is no stranger to this franchise, having directed the second (which he also co-wrote), third, and fourth entries of the original cycle of movies (The new one, as the title suggests, could begin a new cycle of sorts). Neither are screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger, who co-wrote the first attempt to softly reboot the series with Jigsaw. Considering those credentials, the beginning of this movie suggests that it's going to be a lot more of the same.

A man is knocked unconscious by a pig-masked attacker and awakens in an elaborate trap. He's standing on a ladder in the middle of some subway tracks, and the train will arrive in a matter of minutes. A TV shows the masked assailant, who wants to "play a game." The captive can free himself and lose a part of his anatomy (We'll keep it vague) or be hit by the speeding train. "Live or die," the mysterious figure says. If you've seen any of these movies, you'll recognize that statement—and have a good idea of how gory the results are.

There inevitably are more gruesome deaths, as the secret serial killer continues the work inspired by Jigsaw. The major modification to this entry is that those killings—as tongue-dislodging, finger-ripping, and face-melting as they may be—aren't the primary focus of the story. Our protagonist is Zeke Banks (Chris Rock), a police detective who knew the first victim, a fellow cop, and is assigned to track down the murderer. Yes, the story basically becomes a police procedural, as Zeke and his rookie partner William (Max Minghella) investigate each crime, find and follow and are delivered the clues, and try to piece together the identity of this new Jigsaw copycat. The gory stuff is mainly punctuation.

As a murder mystery, this plot is fairly generic, but by eliminating the elaborate game setups and dumps of exposition of the previous movies, we can just appreciate and be frustrated by what this isolated story is trying to do. The frustrations are as plain as the premise. We get a load of red herrings (close-ups of characters looking suspicious after some piece of information is revealed or sneaking away before anyone, except the audience, notices), plenty of language puzzles (either from the killer's notes and videos or from dialogue that's patently vague, in a way that gives away too much through omission), and circular sense of repetition from the plot. The real problem—beyond the story's predictable construction and implementation—is that, because these movies have more or less trained us to anticipate at least one big twist (especially in regards to the Big Reveal), we're always about five steps ahead of any trick that Stolberg and Goldfinger try to pull.

As for the more admirable elements here, the movie possesses a realistic sense of griminess to complement this different approach (Thank cinematographer Jordan Oram, making his feature debut in the job). Like the previously least-bad installment of the series (Until now, that was Saw VI, in which a dead-in-body-only Jigsaw held up a mirror to the for-profit health industry), this new installment has a real-world concern, too.

The killer's targets are corrupt cops, implementing or covering up excessive force and even murder for their own needs or to keep the crime numbers low. Zeke, who's apparently the only good cop in the department now and possibly in the past, once fought that corruption in his own way, and his co-workers' ire toward him doesn't help their chances in surviving the killer's mission.

It's a somewhat clever, if not cleverly examined or dissected, idea. Then again, like its predecessors, Spiral: From the Book of Saw isn't exactly dealing in such expectations, so we should take what we can get from this series.

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