Warning: This article discusses plot details of the ending and mid-credits scene of Saw X.
Every Saw movie is defined by three tropes: gory traps, excessive flashbacks, and major twist endings. When the bells of Charlie Clouser’s “Hello Zepp†theme begin to chime, you know you’re in for a ridiculous rug-pull, and the series’ tenth entry, Saw X, is no X-ception. This is one of those endings you see coming from miles away, but what makes it so audacious is the wrench it throws into Jigsaw’s gears, and the surprising sentimentality with which the movie wraps things up.
The film truly cares about Jigsaw/John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a sadistic serial killer with a warped moral code and commendable engineering chops, and it works overtime to humanize him. Since Saw X is an in-between-quel — it’s set sometime before his death in Saw III — the audience knows full well that he won’t succumb to either his terminal cancer or to outside interference in his sick games, which puts him in mortal danger. The film’s third act revolves entirely around the latter, with Jigsaw seemingly being outsmarted for once. But this is also a man we’ve seen play 5D chess on numerous occasions, including from beyond the grave. It isn’t a matter of “if,†but of “how†and “when†he’ll come out on top. The deranged murder-house always wins.
After he’s conned into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fake miracle treatment in Mexico, the famed “I don’t technically kill anyone†serial killer is out for revenge. Along with his apprentice and reformed victim Amanda (Shawnee Smith), he kidnaps the Norwegian mastermind behind the operation, Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund), along with three of her poor and desperate local cronies, Gabriela (Renata Vaca), Valentina (Paulette Hernandez) and Mateo (Octavio Hinojosa), and gives them their own vicious, surgical “tests.†Despite their willingness to self-mutilate, Valentina and Mateo can’t beat the clock, and end up headless and faceless, respectively.
As all this plays out in the same abandoned warehouse Cecilia used as her bogus headquarters, another of her scam victims, Parker Sears (Steven Brand), comes looking for payback of his own, gun in hand. But after being knocked around a little, he ends up convinced to stand alongside John and Amanda as they mastermind their pain Olympics in a booth up above. This introduces the intriguing question of what might happen if someone ostensibly innocent were to stumble into one of Jigsaw’s games, and it sees the moralizing killer concoct an impromptu test for Parker to see if he wants to leave with the money he’s owed (the cash payments Cecilia had set aside for her co-conmen). It’s a simple game with a single rule: no guns.
However, once Gabriela plays and wins her game — she uses a hammer to break her wrist and ankle to get out of the way of an enormous, radiation-emitting device — Parker decides he’s had enough. He breaks Jigsaw’s one rule, grabs his gun from the nearby cupboard and holds John and Amanda hostage, walking them down into the arena/abandoned factory and revealing (a-ha!) that he and Cecilia are lovers, and that he was in on the con as well. What’s more, Cecilia reveals her own monstrousness by killing Gabriela instead of taking her to a hospital; to Cecilia, she’s nothing more than a loose end before she moves onto another city and another set of targets.
She’s like Jigsaw, but worse: in her eyes, no one is redeemable, and even the innocent can be killed. So, before she forces John to play the game that was intended for her, she goes and does something even the notorious Jigsaw wouldn’t do: she grabs a young child playing soccer outside — Carlos (Jorge Briseño), with whom John had a sweet interaction earlier in the film — with the intent of making John suffer as he watches the boy die. Parker may have turned out to be a con artist, but what happens to Jigsaw’s bizarre moral code when an innocent is tossed in the mix?
With Amanda chained up nearby, John and Carlos are forced to lie down on opposite ends of a platform which rises up like a sacrificial pulpit, as enormous taps above them begin pouring gallons of blood on their faces. The only way John can help Carlos is by pulling a lever that tilts the platform in his direction, elevating Carlos’ head above the stream, but forcing blood down John’s windpipe. It’s a return, of sorts, to the series’ Bush-era torture roots, a sick form of waterboarding that Cecilia gleefully dubs “bloodboarding.†What no one expects is that young Carlos (despite John’s instructions to the contrary) pulls a lever on his end too, reversing the tilt and elevating John above the gushing blood, putting himself in mortal danger. This sickening process goes back and forth like a see-saw, as both victims suffer for the other’s safety, and it works surprisingly well to make a hero of sorts out of Jigsaw.
With the bloodboarding in progress, Cecilia and Parker head to the booth upstairs to grab their money and run — but the door locks behind them, triggering a mechanism that closes the taps above John and Carlos. There’s no money to be found in the booth, and another one of Jigsaw’s rickety audio cassette players drops from the ceiling, revealing that they’ve been the subjects of a final Jigsaw test all along. Turns out John knew about Parker’s involvement from the beginning, with a little help from a friend over the phone (make sure to stick around through the credits).
It’s hard not to have seen this coming, given Jigsaw’s almost supernatural ability to predict every decision a person will make. After all, the conclusions of Saw III and IV depend on half a dozen people shooting each other at precise moments in a predetermined order. Through flashbacks to conversations from just minutes prior, Saw X reveals the secrets steps of Jigsaw’s latest game, as a corrosive gas fills the booth, forcing Cecilia and Parker to fight each other for a single, doggy door-like slot big enough for only one of them, leaving the other to burn. Jigsaw’s tape reveals that at every turn, Cecilia and Parker were given the chance to follow his rules — to show mercy and help people, and to not use firearms — but they failed his tests, and his final game will force one to kill the other in order to survive.
Cecilia manages to get the upper hand, leaving her scarred but very much alive — the film’s producers have hinted that there may be a follow-up to this open ending in the future — but the real shocker is the unapologetic melodrama of the film’s closing images. John hadn’t intended for Carlos to be roped into his climactic game (he had only planned for it to involve himself and Amanda). Still, relieved and impressed by Carlos’ wits and survival, he tells him: “You are a warrior.†As John, Amanda and Carlos walk arm in arm towards a golden sunrise, like a family bound by blood, the title, Saw X, fades in gently across the screen… But the movie isn’t over!
This is the first Saw film to also feature a mid-credits scene, and while it isn’t a particularly consequential one, it does throw a couple of Easter eggs at longtime fans. Henry Kessler (Michael Beach), the fake cancer patient who initially convinced John to get in touch with Cecilia, finds himself strung up in a location familiar to long-time viewers: the iconic bathroom from the first film, which has appeared and re-appeared throughout the series. With a mechanical device attached to his torso, he’s confronted by not only John, but by Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), a Jigsaw apprentice throughout several films, who’d only appeared in Saw X as a voice at the other end of several phone calls. In true Jigsaw fashion, there’s always a plan.