James Wan and Leigh Whannell gave us a tremendously obvious clue but that, even so, many of us did not see
Raise your hand if you didn’t put your hands on your head and stifle a scream of surprise at the climax of the first and brilliant ‘Saw’. In 2004, James Wan and Leigh Whannell turned Hollywood upside down with the beginning of a tremendously long-lived franchise—and with no signs of slowing down—with a thriller full of violence, in the music video style inherited from the MTV era and with a final twist, to say the least, shocking.
In your face
But, as in any good film worth its salt, the director and screenwriter did not limit themselves to answering one of the biggest unknowns of the film with a simple editing sequence accompanied by oral exposition. They also made efforts to sow the footage with seeds and small details that lead, almost imperceptibly, to the final resolution.
In the case at hand, one of the plot pillars revolves around the figure of the creative serial killer Jigsaw and the mystery surrounding the true identity of the psychopath who has chained Adam and Dr. Lawrence Gordon in a basement that they share with a corpse with more pulse than one would expect. Twenty years later we know perfectly well that good old John Kramer is hidden behind the killer of the puzzle – and the “lifeless” body – but the film dropped him much sooner than we thought.
When we first see Kramer, played by Tobin Bell and suffering from cancer, in the hospital, On the table above his bed there is a notebook with a very particular drawing: a design of an inverted bear trap., one of his most iconic creations. The funny thing is that, in the next scene, Amanda explains how she survived that “game” without many of us realizing that Wan and Whannell had just solved the great enigma of ‘Saw’ right under our noses.
In Espinof:
