SAW IV - "It's a Trap" 

In a sense, every horror story depicts a nightmare, coming as it does from a writer's imagination, born of subconscious fears that reveal themselves as dark inspiration.

Some are created entirely from the familiar and remain firmly within the realm of the possible, creating an illusion of real life. Some weave the motif of dreams into their narrative, like the Nightmare on Elm Street series, or the classic thriller from 1945, Dead of Night. Roman Polanski's Repulsion used the nightmarish potential of psychosis to create a chilling story, while films like Susperia or Santa Sangre simply lead viewers through a labyrinth of bizarre events with little grip on reality.

The Saw series, which began as a sleeper hit because of its twisted premise and surprise ending, continues to be one of the most horrific cinematic nightmares of all time, building an ever more complex puzzle that falls into place at an ever more frantic pace. It's the nightmare quality, the certainty that what we're seeing would never really happen, the knowledge that we're on a roller coaster ride of the imagination, that makes the sadistic tortures of Saw so mesmerizing in their jaw-dropping intensity.

In Saw IV, once again there are multiple twists at the reveal that pose as many new questions as they answer. The series continues to evolve, this time with the team who wrote the script for Feast, picking up the threads left behind by Leigh Whannell, the Saw series' prime screenwriter.

It's an appropriate time for the torch to be passed, with new inventors taking up shop in this factory of nightmares, as the affects of Jigsaw's death in Saw III begin to unfold. There are new traps to be sprung, new tests to be endured, new puzzles to be solved, and the differences are as subtle as they are brutal, but the bloodline is maintained with Jigsaw's legacy continuing.

Once again, Tobin Bell as Jigsaw is the irreplacable actor at the black heart of the story, somehow making a monster sympathetic for being so brilliant and yet so broken. More of his past is revealed in Saw IV, including his first mechanical "test" of character.

The central characters in this new labyrinth of horrors are SWAT officer Rigg, the longest surviving policeman on the Jigsaw case, and Forensics Detective Hoffman, with the addition of two new FBI profilers. The manner in which Rigg and Hoffman pursue their obsessions with the case, and the way in which the FBI agents reveal more of Jigsaw's complexity at their own peril are the interweaving plot threads that viewers will be following as they lead past some especially gruesome and lingering death-traps.

Even avid fans of the series will be hard pressed to piece together all the parts of this newest "jigsaw" puzzle immediately - it demands not only a review of the events just seen, but of those in the preceeding films, and as the sequels have led us to expect, there are still big holes in the story left to be filled in Saw V.

That's part of the twisted pleasure in Saw's bloody nightmare. In the way it keeps us coming back for more, it's a trap.