It is the first installment in the Saw film series, and stars Whannell alongside Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson, and Ken Leung.

The film tells a nonlinear narrative revolving around the mystery of the Jigsaw Killer, who tests his victims' will to live by putting them through deadly "games" where they must inflict great physical pain upon themselves to survive.

The frame story follows Jigsaw's latest victims (Whannell and Elwes), who awaken in a large, dilapidated bathroom, with one being ordered to kill the other to save his own family.

The film was originally written in 2001, but after failed attempts to get the script produced in Wan and Whannell's home country of Australia, they were urged to travel to Los Angeles.

The success of Saw launched a media franchise, including several films, video games, theme park rides, and merchandising.

After listening to the tapes, the duo uncovers a clue leading Adam to find a bag containing two hacksaws inside the toilet.

Five months prior, Gordon, after discussing the terminal brain cancer of patient John Kramer with his medical interns, was interrogated by detectives David Tapp and Steven Sing, who found his penlight at the scene of one of Jigsaw's games.

Gordon's alibi cleared him, but he agreed to view the testimony of heroin addict Amanda Young, the only known survivor of one of Jigsaw's traps.

The house is simultaneously watched by Tapp who, after being discharged from the police following Sing's death, has become obsessed with the Jigsaw case, and remains convinced that Gordon is the killer.

The struggle attracts Tapp's attention, and he saves Alison and Diana before chasing Zep to the sewers, where he is shot in the chest after a brief fight.

Zep enters the bathroom to kill Gordon, but Adam, having survived the gunshot, bludgeons him to death with a toilet tank lid.

[5] Wan pitched the idea to Whannell of two men chained to opposite sides of a bathroom with a dead body in the middle of the floor and they are trying to figure out why and how they are there.

I remember hanging up the phone and started just going over it in my head, and without any sort of long period of pondering, I opened my diary that I had at the time and wrote the word 'Saw'.

Wan and Whannell initially refused due to lack of traveling funds, but the pair's agent, Stacey Testro, convinced them to go.

[20] In August 2005, Elwes filed a lawsuit against his management firm and producers of Saw, Evolution Entertainment, alleging "breach of contract and unjust enrichment".

[28] Butters, a friend of one of the producers whom he used to play hockey with, ended up cast as Paul Leahy, the Jigsaw victim who perishes in a razor wire maze trap.

[24] With a shooting budget of $700,000,[3][29] Saw began principal photography on September 22, 2003[14] at Lacy Street Production Facility in Los Angeles[11] for 18 days.

It took six days to shoot all the scenes in the bathroom, and these were filmed chronologically to avoid continuity jumps and help the actors stay in character.

[3] He said the style instead ended up being "more gritty and rough around the edges due to the lack of time and money that we had to shoot the movie with" and it ultimately became the aesthetic of the film.

For the reshoots, Whannell served as a stand-in to Smith and Ken Leung in the scenes of Amanda searching for her key and of Steven Sing entering into Jigsaw's lair.

He said that Clouser "really nails it with his creaky, clammy score" and that he "understands that Saw's horror only works with a heady amount of camp, and he draws from industrial music in the same way".

The website's consensus reads: "Saw ensnares audiences with a deceptively clever plot and a myriad of memorable, nasty set pieces, but its lofty ambitions are undercut by a nihilistic streak that feels more mean than profound.

He said Saw is styled like early David Fincher films and "boasts an intricate structure — complex flashbacks-within-flashbacks explain how the characters have come to this crisis — and a satisfying mystery to go with its ghastly claustrophobia."

He compared the plot to Seven saying, "In a blatant imitation of Seven, Saw features a lunatic sadist whose ghoulish crimes are meant, in each case, to mirror the sins of his victims.

[67] The New York Times's Stephen Holden gave a mixed review, saying the film "does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.

What sets its demon apart from run-of-the-mill movie serial killers is his impulse to humiliate and torture his victims and justify it with some twisted morality."

"[68] Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times also gave the film a mixed review, saying, "Saw is so full of twists it ends up getting snarled.

[69] Another mixed review came from Roger Ebert, who gave the film 2 out of 4 stars and lamented the gimmicks and plot contrivances but nonetheless described Saw as "well made and acted, and does what it does about as well as it could be expected to".

Though it features perverse gross-out scenes and a villain with a superficially pedantic motive behind his crimes (his victims, if they survive, have learned to appreciate life more), it lacks the finesse and polish of the David Fincher film.

I guess if you stand back, you have two detectives chasing a psychopath, who uses vile methods to teach people lessons, and those points echo Seven.