"Hello, everyone. It's time to play a game. You all pretended to cure me, but what I have planned for each of you… is very real. The only thing I have not provided is your anesthetic. But trust me… you will want to remain alert."
— John Kramer
Saw X is the tenth film in the Saw horror film series. It is the first Saw film directed by Kevin Greutert since Saw 3D in 2010, and the first installment edited by Greutert since Jigsaw in 2017; the writers of that film and 2021's Spiral, Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, also return.
The film is an Interquel set between Saw and Saw II featuring more focus than usual on the Jigsaw Killer, John Kramer. After traveling to Mexico for an experimental procedure that could save his life from his developing cancer, Kramer is dismayed to discover that the entire operation is a scam. Refusing to stand for this, he sets to work on putting those involved with the fraudulent scam in diabolical death traps so they will know what it's like to have to fight for your life.
The film was released on September 29, 2023. Following its critical and commercial success, the development of an eleventh installment was announced
just under three months later; titled Saw XI, the film is scheduled for release on September 26, 2025.note
Watch the trailer here.
Preceded by Spiral.
Saw X contains examples of:
- Advertised Extra: The Eye Vacuum Trap is featured in the movie's teaser poster, despite its victim being a nameless minor character and the trap itself being only an Imagine Spot of John.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: As John, Amanda, and Carlos leave the factory at the end, Amanda playfully ruffles Carlos's hair.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: An In-Universe example with Gabriela. Amanda sees her as a relatively innocent person damaged by drug addiction and steered by it to act against her good nature, wrapped around Cecilia's finger to enact the doctor's bidding and feed her habit. On the other hand, John insists that she made her choices like the rest of the group and that her trauma neither excuses her participation nor exempts her from being tested.
- An Arm and a Leg: Valentina is required to remove her leg and suction out the marrow from the stump attached to her body. She succeeds in removing her leg but fails to suction out enough of her bone marrow in the allotted time.
- Artistic License – Biology: Valentina would have no chance of cutting off her leg like she did using a Gigli saw in the Bone Marrow Trap. Not only is the femur stronger than concrete, but right next to it is the femoral artery, one of the human body's most vital blood vessels. Even if she managed to cut it off within the time limit, tourniquet or not, severing that artery would guarantee she'd bleed to death either way.
- Artistic License – Gun Safety: After Parker recovers his gun and tries to shoot Jigsaw, he finds that it won't fire. While he was knocked out, Jigsaw emptied the gunpowder out of the cartridges, reinserted the bullets, and reloaded the magazine. If he didn't also take out the primer caps (which have a tiny bit of explosive), the first trigger pull should have set off the cartridge with just enough force to leave the bullet stuck in the barrel. Another try with the next one would have either severely damaged the gun or caused it to explode in Parker's hands.
- Asshole Victim:
- All the victims in this movie are willing participants in conning deathly ill cancer patients out of their money while lying about curing them, so they naturally deserve some punishment. That said, the nature of their punishment at Jigsaw's hands is much too extreme and some do display varying degrees of guilt or sympathy. Except Cecilia, who is this trope and then some.
- Played With in the case of Gabriela. Amanda takes pity on her, being a recovering drug addict herself, and briefly questions John. Later, after Gabriela passes her test, John tells Amanda to take her to a hospital so she can be treated for the radiation burns she's suffered. Cecilia later kills her by breaking her neck, an act that saddens John greatly. She may have been in on the con, but she earned some genuine sympathy from her captors.
- At Least I Admit It:
- Subverted. Cecilia tells John at the end that at least she knows she's a Con Artist, then proceeds to call John out for using his philosophy to hide behind being a Serial Killer. Of course, she still hides that fact from her clients and is also a murderer, even killing her own co-conspirators to prevent them from revealing her crimes.
- Amanda admits that she and John aren’t saints, but it’s unknown if she’s referring the sins that she’s committed before meeting John or after becoming his apprentice.
- Attempted Rape: Just before Valentina is abducted during one of her shifts as a prostitute, a client tries to rape her. Amanda saves her just in time, but given what happens next, Valentina probably wished she didn't.
- Batman Gambit: Jigsaw's plan requires Cecilia to get to the cell phone and call Parker, as Jigsaw had not been able to locate Parker and needed Cecilia's unwitting help to get him to the game's area. It also requires Cecilia and Parker to put John and Amanda in their own trap, although this part is speculated to be more a Xanatos Gambit since the trap could have be used for her and Parker, had they followed the rules.
- Big Bad Ensemble: A unique case due to the Evil vs. Evil nature of the plot. On one side, there’s John Kramer, the Big Bad of the franchise and the infamous Jigsaw Killer himself; on the other, "Dr." Cecilia Pederson, a phony con artist who robs and destroys the lives of cancer patients, and is even able to go toe-to-toe against John in terms of intelligence. Place your bets.
- Big "WHY?!": Mateo shouts one to John when he wakes up in the clinic, John enters the room, and he realizes that John has put him there.
- Blood Is the New Black: John ends up covered in blood from the Bloodboarding Trap, even more than he was in the first film when he got up from the puddle of fake blood in the Bathroom.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Carlos ends up with his face covered in blood from the Bloodboard Trap.
- Bond One-Liner: Cecilia drops one after breaking Gabriela's neck."Unfortunately... I don't think she's gonna make it."
- Borrowed Catchphrase: As John and Carlos are chained to the Bloodboard Trap, Cecilia mockingly uses the former's trademark line "I'd like to play a game" (complete with "the scary voice").
- Breaking Old Trends:
- In terms of plot, Saw X is the only film out of the series to have no Police Procedural storyline or elements. It's also the first entirely linear movie in the franchise, with no flashbacks to other installments or Sequencing Deceptions; everything in the whole runtime is presented in a single, forward motion. Towards the end, however, there are flashbacks and Once More, with Clarity scenes within the film's course used to explain how John got his final victory over Cecilia.
- X is the first film to feature John and his cohorts playing the protagonist role.
- In this film, John personally interacts with his victims throughout his game, rather than his typical method of hiding behind a peephole/camera or disgusing himself in plain sight, and speaking to the victims via Billy, speakers or tapes.
- This is also the first film that's not set in the nameless American city where the rest of the franchise takes place.
- This film marks the first time that a proper game trap has been introduced visually and commenced with no monologue from Jigsaw prefacing it and setting the terms of the test. This is because Jigsaw is placed into the trap, another first for the series!
- Brick Joke: Upon first meeting John, Diego highlights a Tlaloc statue as one of Mexico City's most important tourist spots and the sacrifices that were made in his honor. The lethal mechanical mask in the Brain Surgery Trap is modeled after Tlaloc's face.
- Bullying a Dragon: Cecilia and her crew have been grifting people with their fake cancer treatments, which is already monstrous. But little did they know they just ripped off the Jigsaw Killer. Doubly so for Cecilia herself, as she was fully aware… but did it anyway.
- The Bus Came Back:
- After not appearing at all in the previous movie, save a few photos on a murder board, John Kramer is back front-and-center in this movie. The tagline on the teaser poster even says "Witness the return of Jigsaw".
- Amanda Young also returns since her last appearance (in flashback) in Saw VI.
- In The Stinger, Mark Hoffman makes his first appearance since he was last seen in Saw 3D.
- Busman's Holiday: John takes a sabbatical from his life as Jigsaw in order to focus on his health, and goes to Mexico to undergo an experimental procedure to cure his cancer. After discovering that he was actually conned by the supposed doctors, John starts another Jigsaw game involving said conmen as his victims.
- Call-Forward:
- The movie's whole plot was built from the initial mention of a Norwegian experimental cancer treatment in the flashbacks from Saw VI. X shows John first learning of the now-fake treatment onscreen (with Norway being mentioned as the country where the treatment supposedly had the most success), before he went to discuss it with William Easton after Umbrella Health denied him coverage for several requests.
- At one point, John is seen sketching the Rack from Saw III.
- Amanda's disregard for some of the scammers and questioning of why they deserve a chance to live is similar to her attitude towards both Dr. Lynn Denlon and John in Saw III.
- Yet another nod to Saw III is that the Brain Surgery Trap is basically Lynn's test in performing brain surgery on John turned into a full-fledged trap, with the victim, Mateo, doing the brain surgery on themselves, down to sharing a similar tool kit to the one Lynn had in hand. The shot of Mateo placing a drill on the shaven back of his head is also similar to the one of Lynn applying the drill on the same body location to John.
- Amanda electrocutes Pederson with an unseen device attached to her chain, clearly evoking the Electric Torture method John and Zep used to electrocute Adam and Lawrence in the first film.
- Henry Kessler's scar turning out to be false is probably a reference to Bobby Dagen from Saw 3D scarring himself to make his false story of escaping a Jigsaw trap more believable.
- In another possible Call-Forward to 3D, the way Pederson first wakes up in the game has a resemblance to how Joyce did on the Brazen Bull's platform.
- The Cameo: Mark Hoffman returns in the mid-credits scene, having helped John locate Henry, the patient that set him on the path to the clinic, for the purposes of trapping him.
- Central Theme: Mortality and cynicism. At the start of the film, John Kramer, the pessimistic Jigsaw Killer, proclaims his desire to fight his cancer at every cost, and when he thinks he is cured, he begins to abandon his Jigsaw career out of hope for life. He is shattered and seemingly irrevocably returned to it once he learns he's been completely scammed. As he puts his scammers through a game, he has to break it to Amanda that he can't keep fighting and that he is dying and will leave her alone, and in the last act, Cecilia puts an innocent boy against John in a trap, causing John to fly against the expectations he has for his victims and refuse to fight against the trap, forcing the controls out of the boy's hands and insisting on letting it take his own life to save the boy if that's what it has to come to. However, Carlos takes control of the trap at one point to try sparing John, a noble act that seems to reignite some hope in him to fight for his health and his life...and to keep up his twisted moral mission as Jigsaw, which continues in the later chronological films.
- Complexity Addiction: John, as usual for the series. He has Cecilia and Parker held hostage early on. He could have simply locked them in the poison room. Instead, he decides to trick them into the room by pretending not to know Parker is in league with Cecilia, giving him a disarmed gun, allowing him to free her, and then assuming they will both enter the room and leave John and Amanda alive outside of it. This plan also seems to rely on Amanda and himself being placed in the bloodboarding trap meaning he planned to have his apprentice and himself tortured for no reason.
- Consumer Conspiracy: The Pedersons claim persecution by the pharmaceutical industry as the reason why they and their revolutionary cancer treatment were run out of Norway and why they had to move their operations to Mexico under secrecy. It's all a scam, though.
- Continuity Nod:
- Just like the original, this film has a scene of a blood-soaked John sitting up, looking upwards and struggling to open his eyes at the climax of the film.
- The Stinger, which takes place in the franchise's iconic Bathroom, naturally contains the badly decomposed bodies of Zep Hindle and Adam Stanheight left from the original film's events.
- Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Downplayed. Amanda covers Carlos's eyes to protect him from Cecilia and Parker fighting to the death while being slowly poisoned… although he's in a room already containing multiple grisly dead bodies, and once Cecilia kills Parker and is left trapped, Amanda doesn't cover Carlos's eyes as the two of them and John leave the room.
- Death by Materialism: After Cecilia and Parker overpower Kramer and Amanda, they try to collect their money instead of escaping. This leads to them getting caught in the final trap and their inevitable deaths.
- Didn't See That Coming:
- John designed the Bloodboard Trap expecting Cecilia and Parker to place himself and Amanda in it. He never expected that Carlos would show up and Cecilia would be sadistic enough to put him into it.
- He also fails to foresee Cecilia being evil enough to kill her own allies, which sadly leads to her killing Gabriela despite the latter passing her test.
- Door-Closes Ending: Inverted. Many other films in the franchise ended with Jigsaw himself, an apprentice, or a copycat slamming a door closed (or some variant thereof) on the final victim. This film instead ends with John, Amanda and Carlos opening a pair of double doors leading to the bright, sunny outdoors as dawn approaches.
- Double Meaning: When Parker Sears arrives at the site of the climactic series of games, he screams that he's come for his money, implying that he's yet another cancer patient who was cheated by Cecilia's con. When it turns out that he's in on the con, the meaning of his words changes — he's come for the money that John and Amanda have taken from Cecilia, and, by proxy, himself.
- Duel to the Death:
- Played with. The Bloodboard trap has two victims on opposite ends of a seesaw being waterboarded by blood. Each one can pull a lever to shut off the blood on the other end and tip that person up, giving them a break. The point is to have the two victims fight over which one is more determined to save the other. John and Carlos end up being forced into the trap, at which point John tries his hardest to keep Carlos alive. The activation of the Control Room trap shuts the Bloodboard trap off, sparing both.
- The final trap in the Control Room has corrosive gas pumped into the room and a single breathing hole with rubber flaps. The two trapped inside have to fight over who gets to use it. After ten minutes, the gas shuts off. Cecelia stabs Parker to death so she can save herself.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- Fellow scam victim Parker Sears has figured out Pederson tricked him, and while he comes to the factory to kill her, he wants no part in the graphic deaths Jigsaw inflicts. While he’s revealed to be in on it with Pederson, he’s still disturbed when Pederson reveals just how sociopathic she is by claiming she felt nothing when her fellow trap victims died, murders Gabriela, and worst of all, forces a literal child into a Jigsaw trap, with multiple shots of his face showing just how disturbed he is during the latter. It’s implied that the reason why he rushes to the office to secure the money rather than ensure John dies is because he doesn’t want to watch Carlos die, either.
- John lets the hospital janitor go when he catches him in the act of theft, only imagining putting him in a trap, though this may have been a combination of both his imminent death making him feel merciful, and the janitor having a pang of conscience and not going through with the theft after all. He's also disgusted with Cecilia for murdering Gabriela after she survived her trap and putting an innocent child in one of them, and ends up Taking the Bullet for the poor kid.
- This is subtly played out by the traps John puts the con-artists through, in that their severity is seemingly proportional to the level of involvement they played in the scam. Gabriela, who was only loosely involved only has to "break her shackles" so to speak by busting her hand and foot. Her trap, while still deadly, was far easier than the fake doctors Mateo's or Valentina's traps.
- Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: The imagined Eye Vacuum Trap has John making remarks about the custodian's "sticky fingers" and how John has had "an eye on [him]" and that he "doesn't like what [he sees]."
- Evil Is Petty:
- When Cecilia gets the upper hand over John at one point, John genuinely tries to plead with her to get Gabriela some help after Gabriela has won her game and is badly injured. Cecilia responds by killing Gabriela out of petty spite. She also decides to kill Carlos or at the least make sure he is harmed just because she knows he is an innocent kid and also because John got along with him.
- Evil vs. Evil:
- John and Amanda versus Cecilia and her team of scam artists.
- Eventually, Pederson reveals herself to be even worse than John when she forces Carlos, a child, into a trap alongside John just to spite him. Said trap was a deliberately non-lethal one, but she and Carlos didn't know that.
- Before Valentina's abduction, she was in the midst of getting raped by a man who refused to pay her for prostitution services. Said man is clubbed by Amanda because John wants Valentina to participate in the movie's game.
- Exact Words: In a more humorous example than usual for the series, when Cecilia asks John what he does for a living, he replies that he helps people work out their emotional problems and make positive changes in their life.Cecilia: Like a life coach, yeah?
John: Something like that. - Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: As Cecilia searches for the money, Parker wonders something: since her trap had two spots, who was the other one meant for? Cue her grabbing the money bag and triggering the final trap, revealing they were being played all along.
- Eye Scream:
- The Eye Vacuum Trap:
- It was first featured in the movie's teaser poster, which shows a man in a trap with two hoses funneling into his eyes in an "X" shape, continuing the trend of the numbered Saw films using representations of their entry number in posters.
- In the film proper, a custodian is put into this trap and is given the Sadistic Choice of breaking his fingers one by one or having his eyes sucked out of his skull by the vacuuming hoses. He fails the trap, and we see each of his eyes get sucked out one after the other, but this turns out to be an Imagine Spot of John watching the custodian trying steal things from a sleeping patient, only to back off when he notices John.
- While he appears to be already dead, the poisonous gas in the Control Room appears to blind Parker.
- The Eye Vacuum Trap:
- Failed a Spot Check: Neither Parker nor Cecilia notice that her game is clearly a setup. It is a two-person competition, yet only Cecilia would have been able to participate by the time her game started. Parker finally notices this several minutes later, but by then it is too late.
- Fingore: In John's imaginary Eye Vacuum Trap, the custodian is tasked to twist a dial using his left hand that will activate a device that breaks the fingers on his right-hand one-by-one, in order to prevent the hoses from sucking his eyes out.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: After leaving John and Carlos in the trap that was meant for Cecilia, Cecilia and Parker go into the control room to retrieve their money. While looking for the money, Parker wonders if Cecilia's trap was only meant for her, considering how the trap can hold two people. Once Cecilia finds the bag with the money and takes it off the shelf, it immediately activates the real trap for the duo, and it's subsequently revealed that John and Amanda knew about Parker's involvement with Cecilia.
- Forced to Watch: Jigsaw's game in this film takes the Bathroom Game from the first Saw to a new level by utilizing a larger single space with multiple people chained and unable to reach each other. Here, he presides over the operation of a trial for each player, while the others can only watch and offer encouragement to the person in the trap at hand. Since the traps have a medical theme, the setup also invokes the players being held hostage in an operating theater where they must witness the victims performing "procedures" on themselves.
- Foregone Conclusion: Being a prequel to Saw II, we know that the brain surgery will fail, and later, that Parker and Cecilia will fail to kill John and Amanda.
- Foreshadowing:
- As soon as Diego wakes up in his trap and spots John observing, he screams that he "told [John] what [he] wanted to know". The Flashback-Montage Realization at the climax reveals, he ratted out Cecilia and Parker.
- During the capture montage, Amanda isn't explicitly shown as the Pig Mask on Cecilia's roof, possibly alluding to Hoffman's presence.
- Gory Discretion Shot: When Mateo fails to complete his test in time, the Tlaloc mask closes on his face and roasts his head alive. We hear him scream and see steam coming from the mask, but we never see the end result.
- Greed: In her "Reason You Suck" Speech to John, Cecilia tells him that when Mateo and Valentina each died, her only thoughts were that there was one less person to split the money with. It also proves to be her fatal flaw; had she simply cut her losses and gotten out of there when she had the chance, she wouldn't have gotten trapped.
- Halfway Plot Switch: Tonally, at least. Someone unfamiliar with the Saw franchise would watch this movie and, barring one Imagine Spot right near the start of the film, think it was a mundane medical drama about an old man fighting against cancer. And then The Reveal happens, and it turns right back into a typical Saw film.
- Heel–Face Turn: A quick subversion. After receiving his treatment and being given a new lease on life, John seems to consider retiring from his serial killer ways, ripping out sketches of a torture device he was designing and throwing them away. Then he discovers his treatment was a scam, and he gets right back into it.
- Hope Spot: Not only does John seem to be cured of his cancer following his treatment, he even seems to contemplate putting an end to his killing spree.
- Hypocrite:
- Downplayed. John claims that his reasoning for putting Cecilia and her team in his latest game isn’t about revenge, a claim that’s dubious at best, given his track record through the rest of the series. Cecilia even calls bullshit on his claim once she gains the upper hand. However, the fact remains that everyone involved in this game absolutely deserves some kind of comeuppance for the scam they’re pulling on innocent victims.
- Additionally, John displays his trademark trap-level hypocrisy. While he insists, like always, that he doesn't play favorites, that everyone will be both tested equally and given a fair chance, he is shown putting people he views as more culpable in far more difficult traps. Take Gabriela compared to Mateo. Both traps are still very deadly, but Gabriela only has to damage her hand and foot to escape. Mateo has to perform brain surgery on himself without anesthesia, then complete a logic puzzle that involves 1) dissolving a chunk of his own brain, 2) melting said chunk to increase the density of a glass of water until it triggers a pressure pad, and 3) grabbing and using a key in under three minutes. It would have been a spectacular feat for him to manage that in the time limit.
- Imagine Spot: The Eye Vacuum Trap turns out to be this, as John imagines punishing the custodian for stealing from one of the patients before the custodian sees John watching him and puts the items back.Kramer: Good choice.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Not too long after arriving in Mexico, John befriends Carlos when he fixes the wheel on his bicycle, and in the process, they dissolve the language barrier between themselves. John is easily old enough to be Carlos' grandfather, but they bond so well that it makes John feel like he's actually raising Carlos. In the climax, they both end up in the same trap, and both of them pull their levers hard to minimize the other's suffering.
- Interquel: The movie is set between Saw and Saw II, with the plot partaking from the flashback storyline of Saw VI when John goes to try the supposed experimental cancer therapy he had repeatedly asked Umbrella Health to cover for him.
- Ironic Echo: When Cecilia begs that what Jigsaw's putting her through isn't right, he disgustedly responds, "A lecture on moral decency? From you?" When Cecilia turns the tables on him, and, more importantly, forces an innocent child to play one of John's games, Kramer pleads that this isn't right, and hears his own line shot back at him from a smug Cecilia.
- It's Personal: This particular test is more personal for John as he was conned by people that he put his trust in to cure his cancer only to to find out that they betrayed him and countless other innocent victims for their money. Notably, John directly confronts the victims instead of relying on Billy the Puppet as a mouthpiece as per the norm most of his other games. Amanda herself is more vicious in wrangling up the con-artists, as she’s shown tasering Mateo with a cow-prod and macing Gabriela in the face with her own pepper spray, and who would blame her since these people conned her father figure while giving him a lie of hope.
- It Works Better with Bullets: Parker tries to shoot Jigsaw, unaware that while he was out, Jigsaw removed the powder from all the bullets.
- Kansas City Shuffle: Cecilia's true trap is a case of this. She believes that the Seesaw Trap is meant for her, and once Parker shows up to back her up, she forces John into it while she and Parker make their way to the control room to steal back the money she scammed from John. Except John already knows about Parker thanks to Diego, meaning once Cecilia grabs the money, she triggers her real trap. As an added bonus, it also deactivates the trap that she forced John into.
- The Killer Becomes the Killed: A first for the franchise in which John himself is forced into a trap. Cecilia gloats about subjecting him to one of his own games, and does so in hopes that it would either kill him or force him to kill an innocent child (Carlos) she put in the trap alongside him simply to spite him. However, John predicted he would get put into the trap and escapes shortly after.
- Leitmotif: An interesting case. The main remix of "Hello Zepp" that plays at the end of the film (entitled "Zepp X" on the official soundtrack) hews closely to the variation heard in the first two films, while the variant heard during The Stinger (entitled "Post Credits X") incorporates the brass motif heard most prominently in Saw 3D to signify Hoffman's presence.
- Logging onto the Fourth Wall: John initially contacts Cecilia's group by a contact form on thepedersonproject.net.
- Logo Joke: The current Lionsgate logo is replaced by the horror variant used from 2005-2012.
- Meaningful Echo: "Jalar", the Spanish word meaning "to pull". Carlos first teaches the word to John while he's repairing his bike, and it comes back later when the two of them wind up in the Bloodboard Trap, which revolves around its two victims having levers and being able to control the tilt of the platform they're on by pulling their lever. John instructs Carlos "No jalar!" several times during the trap.
- Merciful Minion: Zigzagged with Amanda. She asks John to show leniency on Gabriela when Cecilia claims Gabriela is a drug addict who only helped con John to be able to afford more drugs as Amanda herself was a drug addict, and to not even give Cecilia a chance (game). John only agrees to postpone Gabriela's game after Mateo's.
- Motif: Medical operations. John Kramer is scammed by fake doctors who go as far as to pretend they're doing an operation on him, and he retaliates by putting the scammers through his own mock medicine. Diego has to perform an "extraction" by cutting bombs out of his arms with scalpels, Valentina has to perform a self-amputation with a Gigli saw and a bone marrow extraction, Mateo has to do brain surgery on himself, Gabriela must break her own bones to escape a medical radiation machine's beam, and the bloodboarding trap and control room trap seem to invoke blood transfusions and anesthetics in concept, respectively. Furthermore, his game begins with every person present in the facility in one room watching the target at hand playing their game while unable to act, thus mocking the concept of an operating theater.
- Mugging the Monster: The central premise of the film is a group of con artists picking the wrong guy to scam and paying dearly for it. As Hoffman says in the trailer, "Out of all the men to cheat, you picked John Kramer?". In the film proper, he says this to Henry, and follows it up with "I'd call that… epic bad luck." to hammer the point home.
- Neck Snap: Cecilia presses on Gabriela's neck with her shoe until it snaps, to Amanda's horror.
- Never Trust a Trailer:
- The trailer includes a sentence spoken via voice-over – "According to these scans, the tumor was never removed" – which never surfaces in the film. John simply figures it out by removing his bandage once the nature of the scam becomes apparent.
- The trailer's shot of brain matter in the enzyme tank means that Mateo would succeed in the brain surgery part of the Brain Surgery Trap. Sadly, in the movie proper, the brain matter doesn't disintegrate in time, and Mateo is killed when the mask closes over his face, burning him to death.
- Zig-Zagged with the Eye Vacuum Trap. The tubes connecting to the victims' eyes aren't really in the X shape that the teaser poster suggests, but the trailers already show what the trap will be like.
- Nice Guy: In a movie where almost every character is either a terrible person or has at least done terrible things, Carlos is a nice, normal kid who willingly waterboards himself with blood to protect a man he has met once, and is one of the only purely innocent people to be involved in Jigsaw's traps.
- Off with Her Head!: Valentina's trap involves her having to cut her leg off and extract enough bone marrow from the leg to weigh down a porous pressure plate, lest she has her head chopped off by a wire. She fails, with obvious results. The start of her trap has John explaining this outcome to her in a somewhat expospeak manner.John: The wire saw that's wrapped around your neck will first cut into your skin, then your vertebral ligaments, and finally, it'll sever your spinal cord.
Amanda: The CliffsNotes version? It’s gonna cut your head off. - Out-Gambitted: Parker is revealed to not actually be another scammed patient but instead someone's partner (and Cecilia's lover) involved in the medical scheme. Later in the movie, this is followed up by John and Amanda being revealed to have known about Parker all this time and intentionally lured him to the building. Likewise, when Parker and Cecilia seemingly have the upper hand over John and Amanda, it was actually all part of the game for John and leads to the real final trap for both Cecilia and Parker.
- Pet the Dog:
- Despite Amanda's dismissive attitude towards most of the scammers in the traps, she is noticeably more sympathetic to Gabriela due to her drug abuse issues, to which Amanda can relate.
- Likewise, John's response to Gabriela's survival is asking Amanda to immediately take her to the hospital, looking in sadness later on when Cecilia kills her.
- Similarly, after Diego, the taxi driver who was working with Pearson, survives his test, John gives him a first aid kit.
- John has a great rapport with the handyman's young son Carlos and even calls him a friend. John was even willing to let himself suffer the worst of the “blood-boarding” trap to prevent Carlos from being traumatized or even killed by it. Amanda even has a fondness for the kid, keeping him close before the credits roll.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Cecilia gives a big one to John near the climax, calling him out for being just a psycho hiding behind a fake moral code.
- Save the Villain: Carlos ends up turning the bloodboarding trap on himself in order to save John.
- Self-Surgery: Mateo's trap has him perform brain surgery on himself in order to free himself from his restraints.
- Sequel Goes Foreign: Or Interquel, rather. Most of the film takes place in Mexico, where Kramer travels for a supposed experimental cancer treatment. Also, most of his victims here are Mexican.
- Sinister Schnoz: Valentina, one of the scammers, has a long, pointy nose.
- Snake Oil Salesman: The medical procedure in Mexico that could potentially cure Kramer's cancer is revealed to be a hoax to defraud people like him. The con artists behind the scam are then targeted by Jigsaw.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: This happens midway through the trailer when The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" plays as background music to what we see of the victims suffering and/or struggling inside their traps.
- Spanner in the Works: John's final trap revolves around a situation where both he and Amanda are chained to it. He didn't count on the arrival of Carlos, who is captured by Cecilia and chained instead of Amanda.
- Spotting the Thread: Done by Parker close to the end. Sadly for him, too close to the end, as it ends up under Five-Second Foreshadowing.
- The Stinger: The film contains the franchise's first mid-credits scene: Jigsaw hooks Henry up to a trap in the Bathroom with the help of none other than Detective Hoffman.
- Stopped Numbering Sequels: Inverted. After the series did away with numbered films since Saw 3D, X goes back to numbering them again (counting Spiral as the ninth entry despite it not even being a part of the Saw storyline). Somewhat subverted in that (similar to Jason X) most people pronounce the Roman numeral "X" as the letter rather than the number "Ten."
- Suddenly Shouting: John raises his voice when he tells the members of the Pederson Project what they're in the game for. The last time he had gotten mad enough to lift his voice above his usual low murmur was in Saw V."You promised dying people — DYING PEOPLE! — that you could save their lives."
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Played With. Mateo, at first, refuses to pick up his tape and begin his test. He's promptly electrocuted with a taser built into the chair until he rescinds his decision.
- Time Bomb: Diego's game requires him to mutilate his arms with scalpels duct taped to his hands to remove literal time bombs wired into his muscle. The scalpels can't cut the wire, but they can cut the flesh. He succeeds.
- Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer's shot of a monitor showing Cecilia standing beside a beheaded corpse with a floral shirt, which Valentina wears during her trap, indirectly confirms that despite Amanda's recommendations, Valentina will not survive her trap.
- Uncertain Doom:
- The last time Cecilia is seen, she's in a trap that's just deactivated, but in a room where there is no other apparent exit, making her survival unclear.
- The post-credit scene shows Henry chained up by John and Hoffman in the franchise's recurring Bathroom, where they pledge to "play a game with him". The fact that Henry's body isn't present in the bathroom in any of the films that chronologically follow this, particularly Saw II, leaves his survival up in the air. Granted, for continuity reasons, if Henry died, it could be that John, for whatever reason, decided not to leave Henry's body in the bathroom and had it disposed of elsewhere.
- Unseen No More: After being first mentioned in passing in Saw VI as the head of the experimental cancer therapy John wanted to take with coverage from Umbrella Health, this film gives us Dr. Cecilia Pederson's first physical appearance. Played with in that some passing dialogue in retcons the mentioned person as being Cecilia's father Finn (who's implicitly said to be a genuinely benevolent doctor, but also a recluse who isn't accepting more patients) rather than herself.
- Villainous Breakdown: Cecilia remains remarkably calm and collected throughout the whole game up to her own trap... until she realizes that she's been Out-Gambitted and panics. While chemical gas spreads in the room she's trapped in, she frantically fights for her survival and murders Parker in order to poke her head through a make-shift hole out of the room to avoid suffocating. As John, Amanda, and Carlos leave, she frantically screams out for John as she's left to rot in the gas-filled room.
- Villain Protagonist: This the first movie with Jigsaw in an active role where he's the protagonist rather than the antagonist, as the plot is much more focused on him and he comes to an antagonistic match with Cecilia, who reveals herself to be far worse than him.
- Villain Respect: In the climax, John praises Carlos after the latter willingly "bloodboards" himself several times to protect a man he'd only met once. Once they unchain themselves from the Bloodboarding Trap, John calls Carlos a "warrior" and gifts him a bag full of money taken from Cecilia.
- Villains Out Shopping:
- John is given a lot of these moments. He's seen writing a will at a coffee shop, sleeping on a couch, traveling around Mexico, sitting at a park while sketching The Rack, and going to a store to buy a liquor bottle to give as a gift.
- Henry buys a blueberry scone while being quite Nice to the Waiter before telling John about the Pederson Project.
- Wham Shot: When Cecilia and Parker appear to have defeated Jigsaw in his own game, Cecilia walks over to grab the bag in the control room... which triggers a tripwire and reveals a 10-minute countdown timer, activating their actual trap.
- Would Hurt a Child: Cecilia abducts Carlos when she sees him outside of the building and willingly puts him in one of the traps, all so she can spite John by forcing him to either die or kill an innocent.
- You Are Too Late: While Valentina and Mateo mutilate themselves and sacrifice parts of their bodies as their traps require, they fail to do it fast enough beat the timer (Valentina couldn't give enough bone marrow in time to pass, Mateo's brain matter took too long to dissolve in order to get the key), and end up being executed by their respective traps.
"Out of all the men to cheat, you picked John Kramer? I mean... I'd call that... epic bad luck."
