John Kramer is terminally ill due to a brain tumor and must confront this terrible reality. At a listening group for cancer patients he meets another terminally ill patient. Four months later he casually meets him in a bar and finds him surprisingly in excellent condition. He explains to him that he was cured with the experimental treatment of Dr. Pederson, in Norway, and leaves him a link to his website. Kramer sends his medical records and is contacted by Pederson’s daughter, Cecilia, who accepts him for the treatment, to be carried out secretly in Mexico because it has not yet been accepted by the medical authorities, controlled by the large pharmaceutical companies who do not want to lose their huge profits.
Kramer is cordially welcomed in Mexico by Cecilia Pederson, but, at the end of the treatment, he realizes that he has been scammed. So, he returns as an avenging angel as Jigsaw, ready to give everyone what he thinks they deserve.
After an interlocutory and peripheral episode like Spiral – The legacy of Saw, the series returns to its main narrative line by recovering the focal character of John Kramer, who, as we well know, has been dead for some time.
To overcome the trifle, this tenth episode of the saga is temporally located in a moment in which Kramer is already Jigsaw but is not yet dead and therefore between the first and second chapter. Compared to the other episodes, the plot is, in its essence, very simple, reducing itself to a sort of back and forth: a scam and the revenge that follows. In this way, the film can focus much more than usual on the character of John Kramer, present from beginning to end and delving into his psychology and motivations. This is an element of certain interest, but, after a successful and intriguing beginning also for the bitter criticism of charlatans who play on the pain and suffering of others, the film, with the beginning of revenge, enters into a territory that is all too well known and predictable.
And it is precisely this predictability that ensures that no real tension ever develops, but rather, at most, a certain curiosity to see how the victims will find a way to avoid making it out alive. Jigsaw’s murderous mechanisms are as usual ingenious and, in their use at times of surgical instruments, give the measure of retaliation towards those who staged the scam with the (fake) surgery. There are some touches of successful bizarreness such as an unusual use of human intestines, but overall it does not deviate from even a complex routine. Creepy elements, buckets of blood and gore are not lacking, in the tradition of the series: those who love this kind of thing will not be disappointed. The final part comes alive with a discreet twist that gives rise to some successful revolutions, even if the insistence on a certain somewhat hairy moralism partially reduces its dramatic impact.