by Aaron Schweitzer, Editor
Welcome to Another Person’s Treasure. In this series, we discuss films that aren’t considered great by critics or audience scores, but are considered great by the author. I think this film deserves a second glance, so let’s get into why.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw holds a 5.2 on IMDb, a 37% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, a surprising 75% audience score, 40 on Metacritic, and a 2.3 average on Letterboxd. I don’t consider myself much of a horror fan, although I’ve found myself contradicting that statement a lot recently. However, the Saw franchise has always fascinated me. Sure, the traps were cool when I was in middle school, but the thing that has stuck with me is the philosophy the franchise, and this film in particular, is trying to demonstrate. It’s flawed at times, given that we’re following a psychopath, and certain films idolize Jigsaw more than others, but at least the franchise is trying something. It could have easily been a franchise about someone doing it “just because” but it wasn’t.
When Spiral was announced, I got really excited. A new Saw movie! And it is a spinoff, so it gives a new situation rather than continuing to beat the dead horse of the original timeline! AND it’s produced, starring, and co-written by Chris Rock! Legend has it that Chris Rock pitched the idea to a Lionsgate executive and they loved it (or at the very least saw money signs), so they moved forward with it. With the rise of comedians diving into horror films (see Get Out or more recently, Barbarian), a Saw film from Chris Rock really piqued my interest.
I saw this film opening weekend and I was surprised by how much I loved it. However, I absolutely understand why people won’t. While the traps are less of a focus, they are some of the most gruesome in the franchise. And I think anyone with half a brain can figure out who the killer is relatively early on in the film (we’ll get there later, though). All that added with the seemingly forced Chris Rock stand-up at the beginning of the film, there are certainly things you could gripe about with this movie. But here we are, and by writing this piece, I am saying I love this film. And let me explain the main two reasons why.
First is the complexity of the police department. While the displays of police mindset are certainly exaggerated, one it’s a movie, get over it, and two, there is more to it than that. This movie seems to take a stance on police work, and specifically a lack of accountability and justice. When you look around the department, however, the people who are made accountable are the ones of an older generation. This film is not anti-police, but it is begging for a change from the way things used to be done. And while the villain’s plan is absolutely not the right way to go about reform, it at least goes back to the philosophy of the first films. The killer has a clear motive, and you can understand him, but the film also doesn’t make you root for him. Overall, there is some really good stuff to this part of the movie that I would hope gets expounded upon in a potential sequel.
The other thing is, this movie did exactly what I wanted it to. Before it came out, I binged the whole franchise. When writing about Jigsaw, I wrote that I hoped Spiral would make “it more of a detective story where our only perspective is from the detectives and we can get flashbacks (like Boondock Saints) to visualize the traps as they are investigating.” That line made me start to put a list together of some things I would like to see Spiral do, and it hit on all of them. It is police-centric, hardly ever seeing the villain at work. The film is more of a detective solving a case than a person stuck in a maze. It has a slight focus on who the killer is, but the bigger threat is trying to think one step ahead of the killer. After the first one, all of the victims are people we know before they’re put in a trap. Rather than being stuck with a group in a specific trap, they’re all in a much larger trap, and that makes it mean something slightly more when they’re put in a death trap. It’s like this film was made for me.
Going back to the villain reveal, it is easily solved early on in the film. But the reveal isn’t the twist. The twist comes when the iconic music starts playing. In this film, it is when Zeke (Rock) has to face his final test by saving his father or killing the new Jigsaw. After choosing to save his father, but then pursue the new Jigsaw, he still fails his test and his dad dies anyway. While the film has Zeke fighting the killer at the end, I think a good argument has them working together in the next film. Or maybe even some sort of three-way-war.
Either way, I’d love to see a sequel to this film, and I’m not sure we will. It works well enough as a standalone, but this is a direction for the franchise that feels fresh and exciting. As I mentioned earlier, I could see why someone wouldn’t like this movie, but it feels like it was made for me.
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