Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)

Spiral: From the Book of Saw arrives as the ninth installment in a franchise that has spent two decades devising increasingly baroque methods of separating people from their appendages. Chris Rock plays Detective Ezekiel Banks, a man ostracized by his own precinct, paired with an idealistic rookie and set against a copycat killer who has taken up the Jigsaw tradition of moral instruction through industrial machinery. The film wants to be a buddy-cop picture as much as a horror picture, and it lands somewhere between the two, in a Toronto standing in for an unnamed American city. The police corruption at its center is treated as institutional rot, a matter of bad officers protecting one another under departmental policy. It is a critique of a bureaucracy, not a broadside against wealth or capital, and the film has no interest in following that thread anywhere uncomfortable.

The casting is notable without being self-congratulatory. Rock and Samuel L. Jackson occupy the central roles, Marisol Nichols plays a precinct captain written originally for a man, and none of it is framed as a statement. There is no commentary on race, no gender thesis, no environmental sermon, no body-positivity subplot, no neurodivergent character, no queer subtext. The film is a machine for killing people with elaborate devices, and it commits to that brief with a single-mindedness that borders on the monastic.

The killer's closing monologue, in which he explains Article 8 and the architecture of police impunity, is the closest the film comes to sermonizing. It is a villain monologue, however, the oldest piece of furniture in the genre, and it exists to justify the traps. The overall impression is of a franchise attempting a tonal reset and settling for competence. The traps are grislier than the themes.