Saw IV (2007)

Saw IV arrives as the fourth annual installment of a franchise that had, by 2007, settled into a rhythm of industrial reliability. Darren Lynn Bousman returns to direct, the screenwriting duties pass to new hands for the first time, and ten million dollars are converted into ninety minutes of machinery, splanchnic detail, and the dependable ticking of timers. The picture opens on an autopsy, which tells us most of what we need to know about its ambitions. Jigsaw is dead. The franchise is not. The audience is expected to keep up.

What the film does not do is carry any recognizable social program. A Black actor, Lyriq Bent, anchors the proceedings as Detective Rigg, and the casting is never remarked upon, which is correct behavior for a thriller and a poor foundation for a thesis. The victims are drawn from a rogues' gallery of personal villains: a sex trafficker, a serial rapist, a man acquitted of domestic abuse. The moral ledger here is individual and punitive, not structural. Nobody in this film is exploited by a system. They are punished by a dying engineer with a taste for carpentry and a grudge.

Jigsaw's cassette recordings do their share of sermonizing, though the sermon concerns gratitude for one's own life, which is franchise philosophy and not social instruction. Women exist in the film to be pregnant, miscarried, or impaled, and the screenplay offers no framework in which that might be examined. The bodies on screen are raw material for traps and nothing else. The film sits near the bottom of the ledger, a relic of pre-recession horror economics, competently assembled, culturally inert, and honest about exactly one thing: it wants your money.