All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Read on or go back — make your choice.
For the main Foreshadowing page for Saw, go here.
- At the opening chase scene, there's a red "X" painted on a metal beam, which Edgar ends up standing in front of moments before he's shot. This "X" is significantly higher than the any of the cops' aiming range at Edgar, hinting that the shot wasn't from their point.
- As the bodies of the victims are found by the police, there's a note attached reading "And then there were X", not "And now there are X". That, combined with the almost-instant finding of the victims after their death, hints that the timeline is skewed.
- Asides from Anna, Ryan, Mitch and Carly, there's a fifth victim in the main game who supposedly dies in the Bucket Room due to him not waking up. However, unlike all of the other victims, his "death" happens offscreen, with the camera simply panning to the next room just as he's about to get sliced by the saws. Plus, we don't get to know anything about him, other than the fact that he's apparently a man. Adding to the fact that this isn't the first time it happened in the series, since it was previously seen with Hoffman just before his reveal as an apprentice in Saw IV (it even happens again later on in a more similar manner), you could figure that he's going to turn out to be someone affiliated to Jigsaw, even if his identity as Logan isn't foreshadowed here.
- Mitch's attempt to just cut his finger in the first game, only to have the chain jerk him forward and spill much more blood, foreshadows his reticence to reach his hand out to pull the brake in his trap later on, which ultimately dooms him.
- Logan states at the autopsy of the victims that one of them, who was decapitated by the saws in the Bucket Room, had traces of "ferric oxide hematite in the wound". The saws seen in the trap's actual scene looked brand new with no rust, so they may have rusted over the decade between the game and the current events before being used once again by Logan.
- Eleanor has a collection of replica traps she made with plans from the Dark Web, traps which have been in the previous films. She also shows off an unfamiliar blender-like trap, which she says was built from plans for a trap rumored to have been used by John in a game that occurred before all the others, even though no body was found that could have been killed in such a device and the game is unproven to have happened. So the fact that we see that trap in use during the barn game is a hint that it's actually in the past, and that the game we're shown is the very one Eleanor heard rumors of, rather than the game producing the victims in the police investigation.
- All the victims found by the police are said to have connections to Halloran's cases, yet the deaths Ryan caused happened when he was a teenager. Halloran would've also been a teenager himself at the time, so this is a sign that the people in the barn aren't the same ones the cops are finding.
- Related to the above, the victims listen to recordings on Jigsaw's typical tape recorders, an outdated form of holding audio data. At the morgue/precinct, the investigators find the recordings on micro-SD cards, which are more modern.
- Bordering on Fridge Brilliance, the behavior of the victims can be perplexing through the game, as they keep ignoring Jigsaw and the rules, or looking for workaround, with deadly consequences. The most egregious cases are Mitch, who would have won if he had just pulled the brake instead of getting out of the trap, and Ryan, who falls for a simple Secret Test of Character, two mistakes that people who have good knowledge about Jigsaw wouldn't have made. Which is, in fact, that first clue that they aren't familiar with Jigsaw at all and that the game doesn't take place in the present, but in the past.
- Anna says she didn't do anything to deserve being put in the game, yet John and his apprentices don't target most of their victims unless they did something to deserve it. This foreshadows that Anna is truly more reprehensible than she can admit to being.
- The final confrontation between Anna, Ryan and John has a number of clues pointing to the fact that all the scenes in the barn take place years before the rest of the movie. To wit...
- Anna is shown to be John's neighbor, and yet when he reveals himself to her, she isn't in the least bit surprised to see him alive. She is shocked to see him, but only because he's the killer, something that by the events of Jigsaw is publicly well-known.
- Anyone as close to John as Anna would be well aware of the Jigsaw Killer's M.O. and would've brought it up during their ordeal, but she doesn't because at that point in the timeline, the general public doesn't know John is Jigsaw and he wouldn't be that famous yet.
- Anna is said to have accompanied John to his chemotherapy, something that would've happened about 10 years before the events of the film, and yet she looks exactly the same during her confrontation with John, because it takes place before the first movie.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Halloran, after deactivating his Laser Collar, looks up and sees the burn marks in the ceiling above him. At the same time, he notices there aren't any above Logan, even though there should be. And then Logan gets up...
