When it comes to horror movies, I’m fairly accustomed to seeing the same plots again and again. The teens/college students who are camping, having a sleepover or throwing a party in an abandoned house are slowly going to get picked off by a serial killer. The family wanting to get a fresh start is going to get haunted. It’s almost always the same setups and sequences of events, regardless of who or what the villain is. The characters are simply there because you can’t have a victim without a body.

Maybe this is my fault for somehow going this far into my life without seeing this modern horror classic, “Saw” (2004), but the movie was a unique deviation from this.

The main difference is how much time we spend with the characters, and how few there are. I won’t deny that there’s plenty of gratuitous violence, but in this film, that’s kind of the point. In his mind, Jigsaw has plenty of reasons to hurt these people (or, more accurately, to force them to hurt themselves). That is part of where the horror comes from, that at any moment you could be snatched off the street and forced to endure countless horrors because someone doesn’t like how you’re living your life.

But it truly was unexpected to see a movie that was propelled forward by the sheer acting force of two actors trapped in a room together with a corpse.

Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) were a fairly compelling duo, but dear God, they should have just made Gordon English. Elwes could not maintain an American accent for the life of him. When he could, it was great, but every third word had an English accent, and it only got worse as the movie continued. He is inescapably English, and if his casting was so important, the film should have just embraced it.

Overall, the movie kept me on the edge of my seat, and if somehow you still haven’t managed to see it, the ending is one that you can’t miss. I don’t think anyone could have predicted it.