I made an interesting discovery last night. In addition to being appropriately grotesque, being good fodder for morality discussions, and including the occasional jump-in-your-seat scares and/or nudity, the Saw movie series also has an intricately convoluted plot[1] that rewards multiple viewings of each movie as well as of the series as a whole. The four films have covered between six and eight months of in-series time, now, and each successive entry relies heavily on knowledge of the previous episodes to be able to best follow the new twists and turns. This is probably the smartest horror franchise of all time. (Which, okay, is about a hundred years now. But still.)

Saw IV has what they all have: a few people in individual short-term traps with the choice to force themselves to live via pain and sacrifice or die easily, as well as an ongoing storyline in which Jigsaw is trying to impart an important lesson upon one or more main characters. Everything you think you understand about what’s happening will be wrong, until it all falls together in the final frames. Which is another piece of intelligence about the series. Knowing that there’s a twist coming doesn’t make any difference in the ability to anticipate it correctly, and not particularly because of hidden information. Almost everything you need to know is present on the screen, and Jigsaw essentially never lies or even attempts to mislead. I guess some truths, we’re just conditioned not to hear.

To the extent that anyone will be willing to listen to me recommend a horror movie, I have this to say. It’s extremely violent in disturbing and disgusting ways. But if you can stand that (it makes me squirm, a lot) or at least peek between your fingers occasionally during the bad parts, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much and in how many ways each of these movies will make you think.

[1] Mike: you know how the time travel movies come along, and the reviewers complain about how confused they are, and it’s ridiculous? If a reviewer said that any of these but the first one was hard to follow, I would be willing to cut them a fair bit of slack. (In fact, albeit mostly due to mixing up two of the characters that looked too much alike, I needed Pete’s help to be sure I knew what had happened in this one. But I also found that I had missed a lot of detail in the first three movies as well, during said research.)