4 out of 5

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Yeah, you got me.  Saw III was a pleasant step up from the generic sequelness of Saw II, but it did seem to mostly conclude that which needed concluding and suffered a bit from over-wrought scripting baggage.  So when next Halloween rolled around, with another entry in the series happening and Jigsaw dead, there was definitely an expectation for this entry to fall into the slush of sequels-for-sequels’-sake category.  But, as the bloody-disgusting review noted, a yearly release cycle – especially for something as production heavy as the Saws can be – means the rush either over-exposes the flaws, or actually causes something unique to splatter on screen, as no one has time to mess it up too badly.  And Saw IV was actually the latter.  Instead of going deeper into tropey trends, director Bousman synthesizes the Saw I aping he used in II with the experimentation of III to come up with a really fresh style that certainly employs the fast-edit tricks of the new horror age, but with stunning transitions and an awareness of space that add an almost dancelike grace to the grotesquerie.  His balance of steady surgical gore of the opening autopsy with the swirling madness of the traps is a perfect cinematic example of context and presentation being capable of flip-flopping tone in an instant.  Our new-to-the-franchise scripters (Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan) match this quality by finally balancing story and characters, such that we actually understand motivations – even if we only meet these people for a couple scenes – and pace things effectively to keep the ridiculousness checked by a core ‘chase’ element of tracking down the pieces of Jigsaw’s – perhaps – final puzzle.  Thus instead of being a torture film where we’re just watching people trapped in a trap, we the viewer get to feel like active participants in the games, tying into tape recorders and messages telling our characters to see and feel what Jigsaw did.  It’s an exciting refresher to the series, still silly and grisly and illogical, but finally comfortable with itself for being so, our filmmakers perfectly using the conclusions of part III to start their own chapter of the Saw saga.