Saw X marks a huge return to form for the horror franchise, but the movie’s best trap comes with a disappointing twist. The 2023 horror movie is the 10th installment of the Saw franchise, and it has achieved the seemingly impossible, as Saw X has a “fresh” 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Not a single Saw movie has ever been rated fresh, not even the first movie, which is the second-highest-scoring Saw film with just a 50% on the review aggregate. Saw X flips what everybody knows about the franchise by making John Kramer the protagonist, and the film somehow even redeems the villain.
Ironically, despite being the highest-scoring Saw movie, Saw X is one of the least violent. Saw X has seven full traps in total with six deaths, and while the movie has copious amounts of blood, those are still extremely low numbers for the series. However, part of the reason for the low kill count is the trap that’s teased in the posters and trailers. A custodian is stuck in the “eye-vacuum” trap, in which he must snap off his fingers before the time is up, otherwise, his eyes will be ripped out of his sockets. It’s the most creative trap, but a misguided twist totally ruins it.
Saw X’s Eye Trap Dream Twist Ruined It
The eye vacuum is the first trap in Saw X, and the subject is a hospital custodian whom John caught stealing from patients. The custodian wakes up in the trap, and after snapping a couple of his fingers and screaming in agony, his time runs out. As a result, both of his eyeballs are sucked out of his skull. There’s no doubt that the trap looks horrific while it’s happening, but it’s then revealed that the trap was a daydream of John’s. Back in the hospital, the custodian puts back the stolen items, and in response, John states, “Smart choice.”
Despite the brutality of the trap, knowing that it isn’t real gives the scene way less impact, and it almost feels like a cruel bait-and-switch at the audience’s expense. What’s worse is that the trap is at the center of all of Saw X‘s promotional materials. As a result, the trap comes off as underwhelming when what viewers thought would be the showstopper turns out to be a daydream in the movie’s opening minutes. John’s one-liner following the daydream might be funny, but it feels totally out of character, too.
Saw X’s Trap Twist Shows A Problem With The John Kramer Story
For the most part, the first half of Saw X is completely trapless, and it isn’t scary either. Instead, the movie’s first half is about John Kramer’s battle with brain cancer. In that respect, shoe-horning in a trap — that turns out to be a daydream — is a cheap way to give audiences what they want while leaning into John’s personal journey. However, the sequence does at least show that he can be forgiving, and John only daydreaming and not acting on it could also speak to how vulnerable he was at that time, as his cancer was only getting worse.
Nevertheless, given how little impact the trap has on the movie’s overarching narrative, the poster for Saw X was still a massive and somewhat disappointing misdirection. The opening trap might have been typically disgusting, but the daydream lessened the excitement. The trap also started an irregular direction for Saw X: light humor. Following the one-liner, the John Kramer story saw him sketching traps in a notebook on a park bench, and goose-stepping around his hobby, calling it something like a “life coach.”
