Constrained by a low budget and low expectations of success, James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. Now considered a sleeper hit, it spawned a franchise of splatter films, written off by critics as torture porn. Saw is beloved by fans for ingenious storytelling, its gritty aesthetic, and characters you either hate to love or love to hate. Most notably, these characters are placed into situations that force them to face their mortality as they play Jigsaw’s elusive game, pushing them to either change their ways or continue down their selfish path.

Adam Stanheight (Whannell) opens the film unconscious in a bathtub. As he thrashes awake, he unknowingly pulls the plug and flushes away the key to his escape. Searching the darkness, he asks, “Am I dead?” Confused and disoriented, but when faced with his mortality, incredibly apathetic. For a brief moment, his indifference becomes concern when he fears his kidneys have been harvested and sold online. Once reassured by his lack of pain, his worry subsides and apathy quickly returns. As Adam fumbles in the darkness, we’re introduced to Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) chained to a pipe on the other side of the bathroom, matter-of-factly asserting they’re not dead. He’s calm and collected, never showing his true feelings about his probable death. His calm disposition allows him to hide his fears, project his distrust onto Adam, and conceal the guilt of his past transgressions while he works to uncover Jigsaw’s identity. Initially, Lawrence shows empathy and a genuine want to help Adam, but once he grasps Jigsaw’s plan, his selflessness turns into self-preservation, and he even contemplates letting Adam die. When confronted with his own mortality, Lawrence’s desire to survive is fueled more by his own self-interest than by any concern for Adam’s diminishing will to live.

On the flip side, Adam becomes determined to escape—not for himself, but to help Lawrence reunite with his wife and daughter, who have been revealed as Jigsaw’s hostages. His initial self-preservation turns into selflessness, a need to save another to make up for his sins. By going along with Lawrence’s plan to fake his death to cheat the trap, Adam understands it won’t just help him escape—it will give Lawrence a chance to see his family again, a purpose Adam is willing to serve. After hyperbolically faking his death and being caught by Jigsaw, he’s frustrated that the plan didn’t work. Yet it seems the frustration stems from the fact that after everything he’s endured over the past six hours, he’s still alive—for Adam, death is preferable. The preference of death mirrors the words of Whannell’s character David in Saw 0.5, who declares, “living is overrated.” In the original draft, Jigsaw’s tape implies suicidal ideation, and Adam echoes that sentiment when questioned by Lawrence. When Lawrence states that you’re either “alive, or you’re nothing,” Adam responds, “Well, I’m alive AND I’m nothing.”

As the six hours slip away, the do-or-die stakes are raised as Lawrence devises a plan of escape. In a box of cigarettes, Jigsaw leaves a note insinuating that the pool of blood surrounding the corpse is poisoned, giving Lawrence a chance to dip one of the cigarettes into it. His initial resolve to help Adam crumbles, and is overtaken by his blind will for survival. In a split-second decision, however, he opts to throw Adam the “sweet, sweet cancer” that’s unpoisoned (although the audience never finds out if the blood was genuinely poisoned or if it was just a test of faith).

As time runs out, Lawrence attempts one final escape—he picks up the hacksaw and takes it to his ankle, right above the shackle. Adam is filled with fear, helplessly watching and begging Lawrence to stop. He saws through the bone, cutting off his own foot, then crawls over to grab the corpses’ gun and aims it at Adam. Lawrence’s primal need for survival—for the sake of his family—takes over again. Ironic, because his job as a doctor and extramarital affair seemed to take priority over his family up until this point. Adam is overcome with desperation when faced with the barrel of a gun, he shouts, “I don’t want to die!” His apathy switches off, ultimately becoming a futile attempt to hold onto his life. However, in Lawrence’s blood-loss delirium, the shot is non-fatal.

Despite suffering a gunshot wound, Adam musters up the strength to kill Zep Hindle (Michael Emerson) when he enters the bathroom. It’s another moment of selflessness—to save Lawrence, the man who just tried to shoot him, so he can see his family again. Lawrence, now freed from the trap, promises Adam that he’ll send help, but saving himself is his first priority. Adam tearfully asks for reassurance if they’ll be okay—which juxtaposes his earlier indifference. Lawrence replies, “I wouldn’t lie to you.” This marks the culmination of their relationship, a sardonic statement because they’ve both lied throughout the film. Why would Lawrence help Adam when he has the chance to save himself and forget him? When faced with his mortality, he knows he doesn’t want to die, unlike Adam’s wavering desire to live, Lawrence’s internal conflict is between killing and saving—clearly an ego-trip for him, controlling another person’s life. While he appears to befriend and care for Adam, his actions are purely self-serving when it comes down to it.

When Jigsaw is revealed as the ‘corpse’ in the bathroom, the audience learns his tragic backstory: John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a cancer patient forced to confront his mortality each day. Rather than accept his own fate, he chooses to make others reevaluate their lives, compelling them to try and appreciate their existence. Saw V unveils the root of his self-destructive traps—or self-saving, depending on how you view it—is the death of his unborn child. This insurmountable loss drives him to confront others with their own shortcomings, using their struggles as a twisted form of redemption. It’s a tragic turn of events—Jigsaw, constantly faced with his mortality, seeks to take as many people as he can with him in this downward spiral.

As John Kramer rises from the fake pool of blood on the bathroom floor, Adam’s fate is sealed. Jigsaw’s chilling pronouncement of “game over” echoes as he locks Adam inside, prompting a final scream that haunts as the end credits roll. In that moment, the stark reality of his situation crashes down on him. Throughout his life, Adam has maintained an apathetic attitude towards mortality, but that detachment begins to waver when he confronts his imminent doom. It falters until it’s too late, and his gut-wrenching anguish in those final moments becomes almost too difficult to watch.

Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is another fascinating duality of a character. When we meet her, she’s slightly bloodied and meek in her demeanor. She developed a heroin addiction in prison after being falsely incarcerated. With the help of Jigsaw, she’s forced to ‘appreciate her life.’ From there she ends up in the iconic reverse bear trap, setting her up to what should be an interesting Final Girl. When Amanda wakes up in the warehouse, her only thought is to remove the bulky contraption strapped to her face. When Jigsaw tells Amanda what to do, she attempts to free herself, but in doing so sets off the timer, shortening the time she has left. Her life is slipping away and in her frantic panic, she attempts to cling to it as much as possible. Finding the body and knife left by Jigsaw, there’s a moment of hesitation. As she prepares to retrieve the key from the corpse’s stomach, his eyes snap open in a drug-induced haze. In a split second him-or-me decision, Amanda stabs him, pulls out his guts, finds the key, and unlocks the trap with a second to spare. With her life now spared, the machine violently breaks open as she throws it to the side, and reinforces the intensity of this game of survival and what Amanda was pitted against. Initially, she wanted to escape her life through drugs, but when Jigsaw faces her with the real possibility of death, Amanda’s innate desire to escape takes over. She wants to overcome, and most importantly, live. Back at the police station, Amanda shows remorse for what she did. Detective Tapp (Danny Glover) asks her, “Are you grateful, Mandy?” Quite a cruel question to ask after someone’s been in a kill-or-be-killed situation, but the audience understands the sincerity of her answer. The depth of her gratitude is later expanded on in Saw II, when it’s revealed that she’s not the franchise’s Final Girl, but rather one of Jigsaw’s apprentices, with unbeatable traps to rival Kramer’s twisted ones. When faced with her mortality, Amanda wants to live, and this blind gratefulness leads her to be groomed as Jigsaw’s successor. She becomes a commodity to him, tragically unable to look past him as a saviour and see him for what he truly is.

Saw was written with the challenge of a plot confined to a single room, a decision influenced by their modest budget of around $1 million.The concept was inspired by Whannell’s encounter with his own mortality in his early twenties, when he stayed in a neurological ward fearing his migraines were symptoms of a brain tumor. At the time, he struggled to believe the tests concluded the cause was anxiety. He used Jigsaw as a way to explore the darker side of his belief that “not everyone appreciates their lives and what they have.” While not condoning Jigsaw’s actions, Whannell saw the film as an artistic medium to explore these themes and has been open about his anxiety throughout his career. Saw presents interesting characters that face and deal with mortality—both their own and others—in compelling ways. For example, Zep would rather kill a mother and daughter just to save face, and Detective Tapp’s obsessive quest to uncover Jigsaw blinds him from seeing the dangers in front of him, ultimately costing the life of him and his partner. All the characters shape the film’s trajectory and inadvertently influence the decisions and actions of other characters, too.

Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannell burst onto the Hollywood scene with a hacksaw and a vision. Wan credits the film’s reputation to it being fresh and unique, and that “twenty years from now, some kid is going to write his thesis on Saw.” Twenty years later, Saw still holds up as one of the most influential films of the 21st-century. Upon their cinematic debuts, both filmmakers reignited the splatter subgenre. In doing so, they created one of the highest grossing franchises, becoming one of five horror franchises to surpass $1 billion globally.