John Kramer and his whole history as the Jigsaw killer. Directed by the Spierig Brothers, Jigsaw introduces viewers to a new group of “players” in Jigsaw’s twisted games, all of them chosen as they have some dark confessions to make.

Parallel to the game, Jigsaw follows the efforts of Detectives Brad Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) and Keith Hunt (Clé Bennett) to find the copycat Jigsaw killer that has started this new game, as Kramer died in Saw III. Working with Halloran and Hunt is pathologist Logan Nelson (Matt more) and his assistant Eleanor Bonneville (Hannah Emily Anderson), who become suspects after Eleanor is revealed to be a Jigsaw fan. As is expected in a Saw movie, Jigsaw has a twist ending, though this time a double one, which changed the backstory of Kramer as Jigsaw.

John Kramer's Return In Jigsaw Explained

John Kramer Came Back But With A Twist

The big question running through Jigsaw is who exactly the killer is, as he talks like Jigsaw, uses the Billy puppet, and the traps all have Kramer's signature style – except Kramer has been dead for a decade. The answer is complicated, but it all starts at the farm. Jigsaw opens with five victims in a room, each one chained to a door on the opposite side and with metal buckets over their heads. Of those five victims, only four make it to the next stage and so on until only two are left: Anna (Laura Vendervoort) and Ryan (Paul Braunstein).

After Anna almost escapes, she and Ryan are drugged and wake up chained in a laboratory where the killer manipulating everything is revealed to be none other than John Kramer himself. Anna recognizes him as they turn out to have been neighbors, with John acknowledging that she and her husband helped him a lot while he went through his cancer treatments. Anna and Ryan don't seem surprised to see John Kramer alive, and that's where the first big twist in Jigsaw lies.

Every Trap & Victim In Jigsaw

Five New Players, New Deadly Traps

All the victims led to the death of another person and repeatedly avoided facing up to the fact.

Before going into the first big twist in Jigsaw, it's important to go through the players and the traps they had to (or more like tried to) survive. Following the message of the previous movies in the saga, Jigsaw is about atonement for sins, though taken to extremes. What the eighth entry really steers into more than any other, though, is retribution from the dead.

All the victims led to the death of another person and repeatedly avoided facing up to the fact: Carly (Brittany Allen) was a purse snatcher who stole the purse of an asthmatic woman who had an attack chasing her; Mitch (Mandela Van Peebles) sold a bike knowing its brake fluid was leaking; Ryan's drunken antics led to a car crash involving his best friends that he blamed on them; and Anna suffocated her baby and pinned it on her husband, who killed himself in prison. All of them took advantage of others to blame, something Jigsaw aimed to address.

Each of the traps is made to make them confess their crimes and truly repent, though none of them manages to. First, all five players must shed blood as a form of sacrifice, and after one of them wakes up too late and can't save himself, each of the survivors gets their own challenge. Carly goes first, and she must it she let a person die for $3.53 by choosing the relevant syringe to cure the poison Jigsaw's given her, but she can't and winds up with acid in her bloodstream as Ryan injects all three syringes into her neck.

Then, Ryan breaks the rules and his leg is caught in a machine that cuts half of it off when he pulls a lever to save Anna and Mitch from being buried alive in a different trap inside the room. With Ryan now unconscious, it's Mitch's turn, and he has to experience the unchecked speed and ferocity of the bike he sold on a giant, spinning machine and press the brakes at the bottom, but he fails and is shredded by the machine.

Ryan's fate is reminiscent of that of Adam in the first Saw movie, both left to die completely alone and chained.

Anna and Ryan are the last ones standing, and at the above-mentioned lab, they are given the chance to recognize that salvation doesn't come from more murder when Kramer leaves a shotgun loaded with one shell for them to use, saying it's the key to their freedom – and he was right, as he hid the keys to their chains in the shell. Anna takes the shotgun to kill Ryan, but it backfires and kills her, destroying the keys and thus leaving Ryan to die there, as well.

Jigsaw's Two Timelines Explained

Jigsaw's First Twist Is Its Double Timeline Setting

The first twist in Jigsaw, which explains how John Kramer returned, is that the movie is told in two timelines: one in the past, before the events of the first movie, and the other in the present, a decade after Kramer's death. In the end, it's revealed that the farm sequence was actually Jigsaw's first game, when he decided to seek retribution for his cancer diagnosis and try to make others appreciate life. That's why he went for flawed people he knew, why none of them had any idea what was going on, and why they didn't follow the rules.

This twist in Jigsaw also provides a few more pieces of how Kramer became Jigsaw: the farm was owned by Kramer's wife, a key presence in the later original films and who was killed in Saw 3D, and among its livestock were pigs, providing some explanation for his affinity with the animal. There were actually quite a few clues that things weren't perfectly lined up that initially seemed like timeline flubs, such as the bodies that turned up counting down the murders having different wounds compared to what was shown at the farm.

In the present timeline, there was a copycat Jigsaw killer who had Kramer's M.O. so well studied that they successfully fooled the detectives, and what they were doing was recreating Jigsaw's very first "game" now with criminals that Detective Halloran had let go as victims – and that's where Jigsaw's second twist and killer reveal is.

Who The Jigsaw Copycat Really Was

The Jigsaw Copycat Hid In Plain Sight

Until the Kramer reveal, Jigsaw throws out plenty of copycat potentials. The first obvious option is Eleanor, a big fan of Jigsaw who gets perverse enjoyment out of working on Jigsaw victims and is so obsessed with Kramer and his "games" that she acquired various traps and kept them in her "studio" – and she went as far as building one of his undiscovered first experiments from Kramer's blueprints. Things soon flip when Logan suspects Halloran is the killer, as he's known for breaking the law and for his brutal ways.

These accusations end up being part of the real killer's plan, as the Jigsaw copycat is actually Logan. He was the hospital worker who accidentally mislabeled Kramer's first scans detailing cancer, leading to a late diagnosis and thus inadvertently creating Jigsaw. Logan was one of the original five players in the first game: the sleeping one who was seemingly killed in the buzz saw trap. However, the lack of severity of his crimes played on Kramer's sympathy, and he decided to save him at the last minute and take him in as an apprentice.

Logan's purpose wasn't just copying Jigsaw, but evoking that initial game to get revenge on Halloran.

Logan and Kramer then worked together on the classic traps, including the reverse bear trap, which Logan showed a particular interest in when seeing them in Eleanor's studio, and developed their doctrine: they don't show anger or vengeance, but speak for the dead. Logan's purpose wasn't just copying Jigsaw, but evoking that initial game to get revenge on Halloran. Among the many shady things Halloran did as a detective was letting murderers free and causing the deaths of innocents, including Logan's wife, who was killed by Edgar Munsen, a player in Logan's "game".

For his plan to work, Logan adjusted audio from Kramer's original tapes to create "new" recordings and sourced frozen blood to make it look like Kramer survived. Logan's victims were all linked to Halloran so he could frame him, and even planted the puzzle pieces of the victims' skin in his freezer. Logan's plan lures Halloran to the farm, where they fight and Logan tells Eleanor to run, and he and Halloran suddenly find themselves in a final trap with laser neck braces.

The lasers will go off and cut their heads unless they confess to their true crimes, but Logan's is a fake, something he reveals just before slicing Halloran's head into eighths. Logan recorded Halloran's confession before revealing the whole scheme (along with the skeletons of Anna and Ryan) to him, and sliced the detective's head with the laser before leaving the room.

How The Jigsaw Ending Compares To Other Saw Movies

It Has A Lot In Common With Saw IV

When it comes to the Saw franchise, the endings of the installments are likely the most memorable part. It all began with the 2004 original, which has the shocking reveal that John Kramer, the real Jigsaw, was the "dead" body on the floor in the bathroom the entire time. It remains one of the most surprising horror endings ever and is iconic for that reason. Later entries have followed that formula from learning that Amanda is Jigsaw's apprentice to Jigsaw's death to finding out Dr. Gordon was alive all along.

It became expected of these movies even if they couldn't top the first one. However, Saw IV took an interesting route that puts it in line with what happened in Jigsaw. Both Jigsaw and Saw IV play with time and only reveal that to the audience during the third act. In 2007's Saw IV, it was revealed that the events of the film were happening concurrently with Saw III. While that doesn't exactly involve two timelines in the same manner as Jigsaw, it does make the movies similar.

Neither movie was met with strong acclaim from moviegoers or critics and that extends to their shocking endings. However, Jigsaw handles the two timelines a bit better since there's a lot more to juggle back and forth throughout the narrative. There were questions about the Jigsaw twist regarding the killer and the timeline that remains messy even years after its release. In that sense, Saw IV's ending is a bit better because it at least makes sense within the greater, convoluted Saw timeline.

How Jigsaw Set Up Future Saw Movies

Jigsaw Wasn't The End Of The Saga, Either

If the world of Saw ever decides to expand again with chronological sequels (that is, a continuation to Jigsaw), it has the perfect villain.

Jigsaw was yet another supposed closing chapter in the Saw saga, but it only made way for another sequel, though one that became one of the most hated entries in the franchise. Spiral is a standalone sequel in the Saw saga, but it followed the steps of Jigsaw with a copycat killer – except this time, it was a predictable and underwhelming one. Spiral was a critical and commercial disappointment, but the franchise returned to life with Saw X, a sequel set between the first two movies in the saga.

However, if the world of Saw ever decides to expand again with chronological sequels (that is, a continuation to Jigsaw), it has the perfect villain now as Logan, along with Dr. Gordon, is the only apprentice of Kramer who is still alive. Jigsaw added to the backstory of the title killer, though not with some plot holes and questions, and it gave some closure to the timeline.