Despite being beheaded in the previous instalment, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) is back to prove having a brain was never a prerequisite to making a Saw film.

Following in the footsteps of Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Jigsaw is able to continue his murder spree from beyond the grave, except Saw never resorts to the supernatural. In fact the puzzle of how to keep Kramer in the frame is the perfect fit for a saga that has always relied on flashbacks and reverse engineering, having long established that his location and vital status at any given time is completely irrelevant to what is happening on screen. One character even admits, “John’s life defies chronology and linear description,” a line presumably copy and pasted directly from the series bible into the script.

This does however leave Saw IV with a lot of explaining to do and a narrative structure more convoluted than any of Jigsaw’s Rube Goldberg contraptions, which are largely forgettable this time around (although special mention should be made of the game of human KerPlunk). It swaps Saw III‘s medical soap opera for police procedural, entirely populated by detectives who insist on pressing play every time they find a tape recorder that they know triggers some sort of torture device.

The 2007 entry has to juggle flashbacks to Jigsaw’s perfunctory backstory with multiple police storylines, in which Scott Patterson (no stranger to torture having been in the last few seasons of Gilmore Girls) has to track down Kramer’s wife, some cops he has kidnapped, and his accomplice within the department. It attempts to spice up this lasagne of exposition with the usual breakneck choppy editing, but this just makes it more confusing. By the time we reach the ticking-clock climax it is totally unclear what is meant to happen at the end of the countdown, why anyone is there, or what is going on.

The twisted logic and scary puppet that made Jigsaw an instantly iconic villain are also long gone, forgetting that he was meant to be teaching his victims the value of human life. His main target here is a detective (Lyriq Bent) obsessed with saving people, surely an admirable quality even by Jigsaw’s standards. The only drawback is the strain his job puts on his relationship, but isn’t that between him and his wife? Is Saw V about Jigsaw torturing someone for forgetting an anniversary?

He also engineers unbeatable traps and tortures the person responsible for the death of his child, both pursuits he railed against in the previous film. And if John Kramer can’t keep track, what hope is there for those of us bound by chronology and linear description?