Jigsaw (2017)
Directed by Michael Spierig
No — Jigsaw is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Eight films into a franchise built on the premise that human beings are best understood as meat awaiting a lesson, Jigsaw arrives as a soft reboot with a barn, five chained strangers, and a corpse that will not stay in its grave.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes several minority actors (Clé Bennett, Mandela Van Peebles) in supporting roles, but their presence is incidental to the gory proceedings with no comment or emphasis; standard horror-film demographics.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Eleanor is a capable female pathologist, but she functions as a plot device rather than a vehicle for any feminist thesis; the sadistic games brutalize women and men alike without ideological framing.
No engagement with racial politics or systemic injustice; the story is strictly a serial-killer whodunit.
No environmental themes whatsoever.
The killers' grievances are personal (a faulty motorcycle, a wife's murder, professional corruption) rather than systemic critiques of capitalism or class.
No body-positive messaging; the film wallows in dismemberment, mutilation, and physical punishment.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
No historical revisionism; the narrative is a contemporary fictional horror story.
The series' moralizing about 'appreciating your life' and confessing sins is individual and apolitical, with no social-justice sermonizing.
Why it received this score
Eight films into a franchise built on the premise that human beings are best understood as meat awaiting a lesson, Jigsaw arrives as a soft reboot with a barn, five chained strangers, and a corpse that will not stay in its grave. The Spierig brothers deliver the expected machinery: buzzsaws, syringes, a spiral blade powered by a motorcycle engine. It opened at number one and then fell away, which is the standard arc for a series that has long since traded shock for ritual. There is gore here. There is very little else.
The moral architecture remains strictly personal. Every victim is guilty of something small and specific: a purse snatched, a faulty motorcycle sold, a baby asphyxiated, a drunk drive that killed friends. Nobody is punished for complicity in a system. The killers' grievances are private, and their confessions concern their own conduct. Eleanor Bonneville is a capable pathologist and a self-described enthusiast of the Jigsaw method, but she exists to move the plot, not to advance a thesis about women in forensic medicine. The supporting cast includes Black actors in roles that require no comment, and the film offers none. This is not a failure of nerve. It is simply not the film's project.
What remains is a whodunit with a timeline trick, executed with competence and no great urgency. There is no sermon on climate, no reckoning with capital, no celebration of bodies as they are, no neurodivergent interiority, no revision of the historical record. The dead are dismembered with an even hand. Men and women suffer identically. The only ideology on display is the oldest one in horror: that suffering is instructive, and that we should appreciate the life we have. That sentiment is apolitical, individual, and entirely sincere. We can file this one under craftsmanship, and move along.
Thematic classifications: sequel, box_office_number_one.
thematic_tags: ["sequel", "box_office_number_one"]
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Part of
Synopsis
Law enforcement finds itself chasing the ghost of a man dead for over a decade, embroiled in a diabolical new game that's only just begun.
Questions about Jigsaw
Is Jigsaw woke?
No — Jigsaw is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Jigsaw have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 15.
How does Jigsaw compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #224 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
Is Jigsaw the most woke Saw movie?
No. It ranks #5 of the 10 Saw films we've scored; the wokest is Saw VI (25).