Kevin Greutert’s latest horror slasher film, Saw X, is nothing short of scary. A prequel amidst a wide, long-running slew of films that span nineteen years and ten films, Saw X stars Shawnee Smith and Tobin Bell. This movie premiered in late September 2023 and was received by its followers with great acclaim, and though the critics might not like it, the Saw franchise just keeps on giving. That’s the reason they keep making films about it.
Today, we will cover several things concerning this movie’s plot. And I’ll share with you what I consider is my interpretation of this movie’s conclusion. So, if you haven’t seen this film, I suggest you watch it first and then come back to this post, as I will include major spoilers for context.
Furthermore, Saw is a slasher, violent, gory film, and in case you’ve been trapped under a rock for the past two decades and have some sort of anguish, anxiety, or feel uncomfortable about violent topics, I strongly suggest you skip this because those feelings might be evoked when reading or watching this film. Setting those warnings aside, let’s start covering this movie’s plot to get some sense of what happens at the end.
When Does Saw X Take Place?
With major iconic and stylish narrative styles, Saw X is a film that banks on the success of its predecessors, and it takes place between the original “Saw” and “Saw II”. This is the first movie that tells a story without any cops in it to solve, cover or investigate the crimes. It features John Kramer, also known as Jigsaw, as some sort of victim instead of the twisted, wicked psychopath that he is. So, in many ways, Saw X is a vigilante slasher film.
What Is Saw X’s Story?
The film kicks off at a healthcare facility. John Kramer is getting a magnetic resonance imaging study because he has been diagnosed with some weird form of a brain carcinogenic tumor, and this sets the tone for a different kind of “Saw” flick because it emphasizes that Kramer, and his actions are the product of his deteriorating health.
We meet the medical team trying to help Kramer, and while in that facility, Kramer meets Henry Kessler, another cancer patient who tells Kramer that south of the border, in Mexico, there’s this medical facility that’s offering some sort of experimental treatments to patients with his condition.
So, John Kramer heads out to Mexico to get treatment there. But as it turns out, the entire treatment thing is just one huge big pharma scam: John Kramer had surgery and is considering dropping the whole Jigsaw murder thing. He meets several people while in Mexico, including Cecilia and Gabriela; he forms a sort of connection with Gabriela, too. The medical team is made up of Valentina, Cecilia, Mateo, and Dr. Cortez.
But when John discovers he’s been scammed, he decides to take payback on the medical team by going full Jigsaw mode on the medical staff. John calls Amanda Young, his apprentice, to give him a hand, and in cahoots, this duo lures the people involved in the healthcare scam to a location that they set up full of traps to go full “Jigsaw” on them.
Each one of the people involved in the scam gets their fair share of slash, gore, and violent torture. They are “tried,” and the rest of the scammers must watch in horror what happens to them. First up is Valentina, who must chop off her leg with a saw and extract the bone marrow from within to get a key to unlock some chains, but she fails, and she gets her head chopped off.
Then Mateo must drill his own sull and remove a part of his brain. All the while, another member —Parker— is held by Amanda, who delivers electric shocks to him to keep him restrained. Because Mateo took too long, a weird metal mask closes upon his face and ends his life amid lots of screams of agony.
After that, comes Gabriela, who’s held in shackles and suspended in the air by her ankles and wrists, all the while she is exposed to some nuclear material with enough radioactivity to kill her. She must use a big hammer to break her limbs and free herself. She does succeed, though, so John tells Amanda to take her to a hospital, but when she does, the member that Amanda was electrically shocked gets a gun and points it at them to free her.
That doesn’t stop the killings because Cecilia ends up killing Gabriela and lets everybody know that Parker was summoned there to try and free them.
Saw X Ending Explained
What follows is that Cecilia makes John chain himself up to the ankles and wrists trap. But she hears that there’s somebody out there, it’s a boy named Carlos that John befriended by helping him fix his bike. But because Cecilia doesn’t want any witnesses, she also chains up Carlos aside from John in a seesaw-like device and uses blood to simulate their drowning.
Parker comes in to help Cecilia get a big bag of stolen money from the control room, but they set up a tripwire that closes them inside while releasing Carlos and John. The control room begins to get filled with poison gas, and there’s a ventilation hole that can only save one person, and that person is Cecilia, who stabbed Parker to save herself.
Still, Cecilia isn’t spared from dying. She can only pop out her head and notice that Carlos, John, and Amanda leave with the money. Meanwhile, she’s trapped with her head sticking out of a hole inside a poisoned room. The movie then smash cuts, and we see Henry waking up to a new trap set up by John Kramer and Mark Hoffman.
In the end, Saw X tries to flip the script and turn things around by telling us that John Kramer is nothing but a sick man whose murders are the byproduct of a brain tumor that made him go mad, instead of the classic psychopath narrative story of a tortured childhood Ted Bundy-style.
