The Ending Of Saw Finally Explained

When you think of the most shocking movie endings of all time, what films come to mind? The odds are pretty good that "Saw" is one of the first names you thought about, and if it wasn't, then it's probably time for you to schedule a rewatch.

There are a ton of "Saw" movies, and the franchise as a whole has become known mostly for its graphic violence and the Jigsaw puppet that acts as the villain's mascot. Back in 2004, though, no one knew what to expect from the first movie, and what they got was one of the best twists in film history. Anyone who's seen it can remember the feeling they had when they first saw John Kramer (Tobin Bell) get up off the floor in that jaw-dropping final moment. It was an ending so good it launched a multi-decade franchise, and the sequels have been straining to reach that peak ever since.

Thanks to all the rewrites, retcons, and alternate endings in the "Saw" franchise, the twist of that first movie hits quite a bit differently today than it did over 20 years ago. The sequels have arguably undermined some of the original's impact, but then again, they wouldn't exist if it hadn't been so powerful in the first place. The ending of "Saw" set the tone for an entire generation of horror films, and we're here to help you understand why.

The first "Saw" movie covers a lot of ground as it introduces the Jigsaw killer, the cops investigating him, and a variety of victims who get caught in his increasingly inventive traps. Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) wake up to find themselves chained by the ankle in a grimy bathroom. Between them lies what appears to be a dead man's body, a gun in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. From the recorder, Adam and Dr. Gordon learn that they've been trapped in one of Jigsaw's sadistic games, and the serial killer threatens to murder Dr. Gordon's family unless the doctor kills Adam by the morning.

From there, the movie flashes back to tell us more about Dr. Gordon and the police who are searching for the Jigsaw killer. The cops meet up with Dr. Gordon in a flashback scene, and they talk to a woman named Amanda (Shawnee Smith), the only person who's survived one of Jigsaw's games. The movie also introduces us to Zep Hindle (Michael Emerson), a worker at Dr. Gordon's hospital who appears to have the doctor's family held hostage. The police are at a loss in the case, but for the audience, Zep seems like the number one suspect behind the killings. Of course, that just makes the twist ending all the more impactful.

By the end of the movie, Dr. Gordon and Adam are at an impasse. They both remember being kidnapped by Jigsaw but are unable to find a way out of his trap that doesn't involve severing a limb or trying to kill each other. Finally, overwhelmed by the need to save his family, Dr. Gordon decides to shoot Adam and saws off his own foot to escape the trap.

At this point, Zep charges into the bathroom to kill the doctor. Luckily, it turns out that Adam survived being shot, and he slams Zep over the head with a toilet tank cover. As Dr. Gordon crawls out into the hallway, Adam searches Zep's body and discovers a new tape that reveals Zep was just another one of Jigsaw's victims. Jigsaw forced Zep to help run the "game" that Dr. Gordon and Adam were playing because the killer had planned a very special role for himself.

Adam barely has time to take in the information from the tape before the body that's been in the bathroom the whole time stands up. The man is actually John Kramer, Dr. Gordon's brain cancer patient, and he's the real Jigsaw killer who's been pulling strings behind the scenes this entire time. John tells Adam that the key he needed to escape the trap was in the bathtub he woke up in, and a quick flashback shows us that the key washed down the drain at the beginning of the movie. Before Adam can wrap his head around the situation, John locks him in the room, leaving him to die as the movie cuts to the credits.

"Saw" leaves Dr. Gordon in a really rough place. He didn't exactly play along with Jigsaw's game, and he might have fared better if he had. If Dr. Gordon had killed Adam like he'd been instructed, then Jigsaw would have presumably let him go free, but since Dr. Gordon escaped the room by hacking off his own foot, he's all but guaranteed to die. The movie knows this, and that's why it doesn't really play Dr. Gordon's escape as a victorious moment. He simply gets out of the bathroom, and that's the last we ever see of him. His family, thankfully, is saved by the police, but that's something Dr. Gordon doesn't get to learn by the time the movie ends.

In "Saw," we don't find out if Dr. Gordon ever sees his family again, and the movie doesn't even give us a hint about whether or not the doctor survives this entire ordeal. Of course, future "Saw" movies addressed the dangling thread left by this particular ending, even giving Dr. Gordon a bigger role to play in the franchise. That, however, is a topic that we'll get into later. When audiences first watched "Saw" in 2004, Dr. Gordon's story was given a pretty unsatisfying ending, but maybe that's the point. Dr. Gordon had an affair, which is why Jigsaw chose him in the first place, so the movie pushes us away from seeing him as the hero of the story.

The end of Adam's story in "Saw" is the part of the movie that people tend to remember best. After all, he's the only character who experiences the movie's big twist, and he arguably gets the darker ending when compared to Dr. Gordon. It's not just that Adam is trapped in Jigsaw's grimy bathroom for the rest of his life, but also that he could have escaped so easily. The movie even gives us a brief flashback to show how tantalizingly close Adam was to finding the key that would have let him escape the trap at the very beginning.

Adam gets the big "shock and awe" moment in the story, but his presence in Jigsaw's trap actually raises some questions. Even the first "Saw" movie makes sure to drive home the point that Jigsaw's victims are all people the killer views as having committed some wrong in the past. Dr. Gordon had an affair that Jigsaw learned about, but Adam, on the other hand, doesn't have much of a dark past. We never learn the real reason why Jigsaw chose him for the trap, and we also never see Jigsaw set Adam up to play one of his famous games.

From the very beginning, Adam is only instructed to survive. Jigsaw doesn't give him a test to complete, which is enough to make you wonder if Adam can properly be considered one of Jigsaw's victims. Future movies play with the idea of Jigsaw-themed killers bending John Kramer's original rules, but "Saw" itself hints that John's ideals maybe aren't as solidified as he says.

The first time you watch "Saw," the twist ending slams into you like a Mack Truck. The second time you see the movie, the ending loses a bit of its luster when you realize that there really aren't any hints or foreshadowing moments to set it up. And if you decide to sit down for a third viewing, that twist is going to leave you with more questions than answers.

Jigsaw's plan seems pretty straightforward at first glance, but the big reveal at the ending adds just a few too many complications to the story. We get that he's a serial killer who wants to sadistically test wrongdoers with specially designed traps and games, but why does he make sure to be physically present for just one of those games? Considering that he's poisoned himself to fake being dead, can he even remain aware of the test that's happening around him? The movie makes it seem like John Kramer is basically unconscious until the moment he stands up and makes his dramatic reveal, but that would kind of defeat the point of him being there in the first place.

The one thing the ending tells us about Jigsaw and his master plan is that he likes to overcomplicate things. Later movies introduce additional layers that take this overcomplication to an extreme, but even in this first outing we can see that Jigsaw's games are as much about punishing people as they are about flexing his own mental prowess.

Despite its flaws, it's hard to imagine "Saw" becoming such a sensation with a different ending. The fact that the movie was made on a shoestring budget helped launch it to financial success, but it was the complete shock of seeing John Kramer stand up at the end of the story that made "Saw" into a cultural sensation. The ending helped guarantee the film would get a sequel, but at the same time, it doomed the entire franchise to repeat the same tactic over and over again.

Twist endings are an integral part of the "Saw" brand, and every movie in the franchise — even the surprisingly entertaining spinoff, "Spiral" — has tried to live up to the original's twist. For the most part, audiences agree that none of them have managed to achieve that goal. In fan discussions, the vast majority of people say that the original "Saw" has the best ending, and on Rotten Tomatoes, the original has the second-highest critic and audience scores.

That's not to say the sequels are devoid of good endings. "Saw II" reveals that Amanda was Jigsaw's accomplice in an excellent twist, and "Saw X" ended with a satisfying shock when John managed to outsmart Cecilia with a masterful trap. Unfortunately, though, the twists in the sequels provide overall diminishing returns, not just because they can't live up to the original but also because audiences always know that some kind of twist is inevitable.

"Saw's" near-perfect ending set such a high bar that the rest of the franchise could never top it. But while the sequels couldn't improve on that ending, they did manage to build on it. The "Saw" movies have a tendency to rewrite the events of previous films, creating a franchise timeline that's almost impossible to follow. Naturally, some of the sequels couldn't help but go back and make changes to the original's big finale.

"Saw II" and "Saw III" didn't make any major changes to the original movie's ending, but they did help answer some lingering questions about how Jigsaw managed to pull off his entire plan. The ending of "Saw II" reveals that Jigsaw has an accomplice named Amanda, and the third movie shows how the two of them work together to torment Jigsaw's victims.

"Saw 3D," which was the seventh movie in the franchise, takes us all the way back to the end of the first film. The movie shows that Dr. Gordon managed to survive chopping his own foot off by cauterizing the wound on a hot pipe. From there, Dr. Gordon actually became a Jigsaw fanatic like Amanda, eventually turning into a copycat killer. The rest of Dr. Gordon's story actually makes the already gloomy ending of "Saw" even darker.

"Saw" has an unexpected ending that's strong enough to turn audience members into instant fans. The final scene is also powerful enough that the people making the movie could tell it would be a hit. Tobin Bell in particular has talked about how he was awestruck the first time that he read the ending. While making his way through the script, Bell couldn't see the twist coming, and once he got to the ending, he knew right away that he was part of something special.

"If they shoot this well," Bell recalled during a fan panel in 2024, "it could be one of those moments in film that is unforgettable." Bell knew that the writing in the final scene was powerful, but that's not the only thing he credits with the moment's success. At the panel, he also called out Leigh Whannell's acting for selling the twist to John Kramer getting up off the floor. "Without Leigh's reaction, it wouldn't be what it is," Bell said.

It's no secret that James Wan is a big horror fan, and he brought that passion for the genre to his work on "Saw." Wan directed the first movie, and he co-wrote the screenplay with one of its stars, Leigh Whannell. Wan has talked about how challenging it was to create "Saw," from finding the right people for the movie to securing enough money to actually get the project finished. Throughout the process, though, Wan could always fall back on the belief he had in the quality of the story. "We actually felt like we were very confident in the script, we were very confident that we have something here," Wan told IGN, adding that the real challenge was getting everything in place to turn that script into a feature-length film.

Even after getting the film made, Wan and his coworkers still faced an uphill battle to get "Saw" in front of as many eyes as possible. Initially, the studio wanted to release the film direct-to-video, even though Wan and the other producers pushed for a theatrical release. "It wasn't until our first test screening of the film that turned it all around for us," Wan said in an interview with Feo Amante's HORROR THRILLER. The audience reaction to the movie is what finally convinced the studio to put "Saw" in theaters. There's a decent chance that if the movie didn't end on such a surprisingly effective note, it would have been relegated to the bargain DVD bin, and the "Saw" franchise never would have taken off.

The ending of the first "Saw" movie is legendary, and that's partly because of everything that came after it. There have now been 10 different "Saw" movies spread out over two decades of filmmaking, and the franchise as a whole has made over a billion dollars at the box office. Other than "Saw X," "Saw" has never really been a favorite of movie critics, but no one can argue that the series is a failure when audiences keep turning up for it.

There are plenty of "Saw" movies to choose from now, but diehard fans keep coming back to the first one because there are still mysteries left to unravel. Twenty years after Jigsaw ended his first game, fans are still theorizing about the intricacies of John Kramer's plan and speculating about what happened to Adam after he was left in the bathroom to die. Beyond the gruesome traps, "Saw" struck such a chord with people because its twist opened up a whole new world of possibilities in the story. In the decades since "Saw" debuted, other movies like "Escape Room" or "The Belko Experiment" have taken inspiration from its grisly visuals and twisting narrative, but none of them have quite captured the magic of James Wan's classic low-budget horror flick.