Saw X Ending Explained: Heal Turn

Through 19 years and 10 films, the "Saw" franchise has taken numerous twists and turns in all manner of ways, which is extremely fitting for a series that prides itself on making puzzles and playing games. There are, of course, the obvious narrative twists — the reveal of John Kramer (Tobin Bell) as the Jigsaw killer at the end of the first film, his actual demise at the end of the third, and so on.

Yet there have been a number of stylistic, structural, and tonal changes as the films have continued, too. The first three films followed various "players" of Jigsaw's games as they matched wits with the man himself, the fourth through the sixth picked a single protagonist who got sucked deeper and deeper into Kramer's legacy, the seventh was shot in native 3D, the eighth with a bigger budget, and the ninth with, well, Chris Rock (and, upsettingly, no Jigsaw).

One element that's remained stalwart through every film since the first, however, is that of a procedural, an aspect owed to original creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell being influenced by David Fincher's "Se7en." "Saw X" switches things up by taking the continuity back to (nearly) the beginning — the film is set somewhere between the events of "Saw" and "Saw II." It's the first to not involve any sort of procedural element, and — happily — the first to feature John Kramer as the unfettered protagonist of the story. Centering the tale on John, "Saw X" is not so much a serial killer movie as it is a vigilante film, one where justice must be served at any cost.

"Saw X" director Kevin Greutert and writers Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger announce their intentions to take the film in surprising new directions right from the start. Every "Saw" film prior to this one begins with someone discovering themselves inside one of Jigsaw's traps, their bodies in a prison of his devising. That both is and isn't the case when "X" opens on a frail John Kramer inside an MRI machine (big year for MRI machines in horror franchises begun by James Wan, incidentally), receiving a scan to check the progress of his brain cancer. The kindly technician can't tell him for certain, but it's clear from her facial expressions that John is still trapped in his own dying body.

Another big change occurs a few moments later, as John witnesses a custodian at his hospital (played by Isan Beomhyun Lee) rifling around inside an incapacitated patient's belongings for any valuables. We then see this man wake up in a particularly insidious Jigsaw trap (wherein his eyes will be sucked out of his skull if he does not break his own hand), only to discover that we've been seeing John's daydream of the custodian in the trap. Almost as if preturnatrally sensing the moral (and literal) danger he was in, the custodian does not steal any items from his patient. "You made the right choice," John says to the man as he passes by.

While Kramer has always been fueled by a sense of morality and justice throughout his trap-making career, he also continually demonstrates a sense of hope for his fellow humans, hope that they behave in ways that don't force him to act. In other words, he doesn't want to be Jigsaw, necessarily, it's just that so many people keep letting him down.

Such emotional weariness is on display as John attends one of his cancer group support meetings, listening to his fellow sufferers describe their resignation to their fate. One day, he happens to see a former member, Henry Kessler (Michael Beach) looking much healthier, and Henry happily tells John all about how he received an experimental treatment from a Norwegian physician named Dr. Finn Pederson (a sly callback to "Saw VI," where John failed to convince his health insurance provider to let him attempt a similar risky procedure, possibly with the very same doctor). 

John does some more research, discovering that Dr. Pederson has gone into hiding thanks to being hounded by Big Pharma, but his daughter, Cecilia (Synnøve Macody Lund), is continuing his work clandestinely. Given only a few months left to live, John is desperate and hopeful, and calls Cecilia, who tells him that she can get him a spot for treatment if he travels to their current secret facility in Mexico City.

John does just that, and meets the rest of Cecilia's team: a cab driver, Diego (Joshua Okamoto), a doctor, Mateo (Octavio Hinojosa), a nurse, Valentina (Paulette Hernández), and a local woman who was a former patient of Cecilia's (and whose house the doctors are using), Gabriela (Renata Vaca). Another patient with thyroid cancer, Parker Sears (Steven Brand), wishes John well on his treatment, and a young local boy, Carlos (Jorge Briseño), befriends John after the man fixes his bike. Kramer soon goes under Cecilia's knife, and upon waking up after the procedure, Cecilia assures John it went spectacularly, and he has his whole life ahead of him. As agreed, John promises to wire her the other half of her hefty fee.

Now apparently free of the trap of cancer that he'd lived a large portion of his life in, John muses on what to do next. After he doodles a design in his notebook for another trap (one which looks suspiciously like the smaller reverse bear trap he leaves behind for his wife to find and use in "Saw VI"), he throws the sketch away, apparently contemplating leaving his legacy as Jigsaw behind. In this mood, he puts together a gift for Gabriela, whom he bonded with during his brief stay at her home.

Bringing the gift of tequila to her place in person, John is shocked to discover the place has been totally gutted and abandoned, with even the portraits of Gabriela's family smashed and strewn on the ground. His worst fears are confirmed when he discovers that the lab setup had been completely faked, meaning that Cecilia, her team, and the entire operation was one big grift in order to extract money from him and other desperate sick people.

A now vengeful Jigsaw tracks down Diego, fitting him with a pipe bomb trap wherein he must mutilate his arms in order to survive. Diego does so, and John allows him to live, especially so he can find out where to locate the con artists who swindled him. With this new information, John calls his friend, a "detective" (more on him later) for further assistance in finding the rest of the perpetrators. Even better, John calls another friend for help kidnapping these villains: his accomplice and heir apparent, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith).

Amanda and John bring the con artists to the conveniently abandoned location they used to pull their grift, which has since been Jigsaw'd. Each perpetrator's true identity is revealed: Valentina is a sex worker, Mateo is the janitor in a vet's office, Gabriela is a drug addict who gets her fix from Mateo, and Cecilia is the mastermind of the con operation.

Rather than put all four of the villains through a single game as Jigsaw has done in the past (er, as he will do in the future, that is), John has decided to make each player go through their game one by one, in full view of the others as well as himself and Amanda. Valentina's the first to go, and she makes a valiant effort in cutting through her own leg with a sharp wire before running out of time and losing her head (literally).

John insists on Gabriela being next in line, but Amanda protests, reminding John that drug addiction can negatively affect a person's choices as it did with her before John "helped" her. Amanda's argument with John not only hints at her past regarding her being an accomplice to the murder of John's unborn child (an involvement that, to our knowledge, John has never learned about in the films), it also foreshadows her tenuous relationship with her mentor during the events of "Saw III," especially as she insists that Cecilia be killed for her actions while John argues that every one of the players must be allowed a choice to atone for their crimes.

Meanwhile, Cecilia tries begging for her life, and at one point gets hold of a cell phone and makes a call to — allegedly — her father, who John and Amanda know is actually real and does apparently have an experimental treatment for cancer. Still, John is not swayed, and the game continues.

After Mateo is made to go next by Amanda, during which the man loses his life (as he's too slow in performing brain surgery on himself), John and Amanda are surprised to see Parker banging angrily on the building's entrance outside. Luring him inside and then tying him up, Jigsaw interrogates Parker, learning that the man was just as swindled, aggrieved, and in need of justice as he is.

However, there's the small matter of John's particular brand of justice, which is elaborate and, for the uninitiated, fairly off-putting. John agrees to let Parker loose, on the condition that the gun Parker brought with him be locked away.

Parker's revulsion at Jigsaw's games mirrors the way non-fans of the "Saw" franchise view the films as the work of some real sickos, focusing heavily on the physical trauma endured by the players. John tries to describe how each player has a choice, and that they're playing the game not because they're innocent victims but because of the choices they've made. As evidence, Gabriela survives her game, as she's given some advice by Cecilia and demonstrates a willingness to sacrifice her limbs so that she isn't roasted alive.

John and Amanda were never going to convince Parker, however, as he's secretly reclaimed his gun and holds Jigsaw and his accomplice at gunpoint, demanding they free Cecilia. It turns out that the person Cecilia managed to call earlier was in fact Parker ... her lover.

As Cecilia and Parker chain John and Amanda up, Carlos arrives to kick his soccer ball against the side of the abandoned building, as is his wont. John tries to bargain with Cecilia, telling her that her ill-gotten gains are upstairs in the control center, but Cecilia decides that she wants to make John suffer by killing an innocent in front of him, and she lures Carlos inside. Given that Amanda and especially John speak hardly any Spanish, they cannot warn the boy, and Cecilia makes John affix the kid to the trap that was originally meant for her.

The trap is a seesaw-like device where two people are waterboarded with blood, and a lever in the center of the platform will move it toward one side or the other, saving one person while condemning the other. John tries to tell Carlos not to pull the lever, preferring to sacrifice himself instead of the boy, and it's here that Jigsaw truly gets a taste of his own medicine, literally becoming stuck in one of his traps.

Until, that is, Cecilia and Parker go to grab the bag of money from the control center, and pulling it reveals that not only is the bag empty, but that all the doors have been shut to the room while the seesaw trap has been stopped. John and Amanda free themselves and then Carlos while they watch Cecilia and Parker become trapped while their room fills with toxic gas. It turns out that John found out that Parker was involved with Cecilia thanks to the research of his detective friend, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), and had removed the bullets from Parker's gun as well as set up the seesaw as the original trap for the couple, while setting the control center room trap in the event that they made it to the "money."

Jigsaw's rules for surviving the control center trap is for one — and only one — person to stick their head out through a panel in the wall, letting them free of the toxic gas. Sure enough, Cecilia and Parker fight to the death over this panel, with Parker losing, a fate that Cecilia isn't too broken up about given her concern over taking care of the "loose ends" she saw her collaborators as.

As a result, Cecilia manages to survive her game, and although she's now seemingly helplessly trapped alive inside a locked room, she's still breathing. Prior "Saw" films have left other characters to similar fates, only for them to turn up again. Could this happen to Cecilia? In an exclusive interview conducted for /Film by Jacob Hall with franchise producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules, Burg had this to say about Cecilia's fate:

"Being that we're superstitious, we kind of don't really talk about a sequel until this movie opens, but if this movie should open, do you think John Kramer/Jigsaw would want somebody out there knowing who he was? There's only one person that's not in his world, and that's a brilliant actress by the name of Synnøve Lund who played Cecilia in this movie. We kind of kept her alive in this movie."

John Kramer is not the type of person to forget about people and let things go easily, as is demonstrated within the film's mid-credits scene, which takes place in the infamous grungy bathroom from the first film (whose events would've occurred not long before this scene). In it, John supervises Mark Hoffman as he affixes a furious Henry Kessler to the ceiling. Admitting that his entire story about having cancer and receiving Cecilia's experimental treatment was a fishing ruse, Hoffman amusedly observes how Henry chose the wrong person to cheat in John. Kramer mentions that Henry's fake surgery scar is now gone, and gives the go-ahead to Hoffman, who turns on the trap device which seems poised to make Henry's fake scar real.

Before that we're treated to the touching moment of John, Amanda, and Carlos emerging into the Mexican daylight, as John gifts Carlos all of Cecilia's dirty money. There are a lot of franchise horror villains who have tragedy in their backstory, yet John Kramer/Jigsaw may have the most sympathetic tragedies in his past, not only suffering through a horrible disease but having his unborn child taken from him.

Just as the pig mask worn by all of Jigsaw's accomplices effectively mark them as "children of Jigsaw" (because Gideon, John's son, was due to be born during the Chinese Year of the Pig), it seems that John's insistence on building a cadre of disciples is less to do with any cult-like megalomania and more about his deep-seated desire to be a father and have a family. While there's still debatable ambiguity regarding his relationship with Amanda, Bell and Smith tend to play their scenes with a distinct father/daughter, mentor/mentee vibe. As the final shot of "Saw X" seems to say, John Kramer may never be healed, but through his legacy and that of his "children," he is immortal.

"Saw X" is currently in theaters.