Jigsaw 2017: Cast, Plot and Ending Explained

The full plot of Jigsaw (2017) follows two stories at once, the barn tests and the police investigation, and they meet in a reveal about who has been running the games. Spoilers follow from here.

In the barn, most of the captives escape the first test by giving blood to avoid a wall of buzzsaws. Carly, a thief whose crime led to a death, is killed in the second test when another captive forces her to inject herself with all three syringes. In the third test, Ryan must sacrifice his own leg to save Anna and Mitch, who are trapped in a silo.

Meanwhile, the police find corpses that match the barn victims. Pathologists Logan Nelson and Eleanor Bonneville come under suspicion because Eleanor admits she is a Jigsaw fan. Edgar is taken from the hospital and is later found in John's grave. Mitch, who sold a faulty motorcycle that killed John's nephew, dies in a spinning blade funnel.

Logan steers suspicion toward Halloran, saying it was Halloran's bullet that hit Edgar, and Eleanor works out where the games are being played. In the barn, Anna and Ryan are made to face their own crimes. The final test uses a shotgun with a single shell, and it ends with Anna killed when the gun backfires.

Hunt then finds jigsaw shaped flesh in Halloran's freezer, which makes Halloran look guilty. Halloran ambushes Logan and Eleanor, but an unseen figure drugs him. Logan and Halloran wake in laser collars and are told to confess. Logan admits he mislabeled John's X-rays, then seems to die. He is revealed to be alive, and to be the unconscious man from the very first barn game, which John spared ten years earlier, making him his first apprentice. Halloran confesses to freeing criminals for personal gain, but Logan's plan is now clear: he rebuilt the games, picked victims Halloran had let go, and framed Halloran.

The killer in Jigsaw (2017) is Logan Nelson, and the twist is that John Kramer is not alive at all: the games are the work of an apprentice. Spoilers follow.

Why does the film pin everything on Halloran? Because the story is built to make him look guilty. Hunt finds jigsaw shaped flesh in Halloran's freezer, Logan points out that it was Halloran's bullet that hit Edgar, and Edgar's body turns up in John's grave. Each clue pushes Halloran forward as the obvious suspect, while Logan stays in the background as a pathologist who appears to be helping. Logan then reveals that he is the new Jigsaw and that he set Halloran up as revenge for his wife's death at Edgar's hands. Halloran forced Logan to confess first, which broke the rules of the game, so Halloran's collar reactivates and kills him. Logan leaves, saying he speaks for the dead.

How did Logan come to be part of it? He is the unconscious man from the very first barn game, which John spared ten years earlier, making him John's first apprentice. That detail explains why the barn feels so deliberate, and why the tests lean on blood, guilt and confession rather than pure cruelty. Halloran is made to confess to freeing criminals for personal gain, and Logan's own confession, that he mislabeled John's X-rays, is the moment the audience is meant to believe he has died.

How does it compare with the rest of the series? In my opinion, the reveal works best as misdirection: the film invites you to suspect Halloran, then Eleanor, while the real answer sits in the autopsy room. The structure echoes the end of Saw (2004), where a figure everyone assumed was dead rises from the bathroom floor, but Jigsaw swaps that single jolt for a slower trail of clues. It could be argued that the apprentice idea sits awkwardly beside the series history, since mark hoffman saw is the successor who carries on Jigsaw's work in saw 6, and saw 4 opens with John's autopsy and a tape recorder meant for Hoffman. Perhaps the simplest reading is that Logan is a quieter, earlier disciple who stayed hidden while Hoffman and Amanda took the spotlight.

The Spierigs also had to work around a script they did not write, and the result is a puzzle that plays fair on a second viewing: Logan is present in nearly every scene where evidence is found. Compared with the harder edged traps of saw 3d, the silo and the shotgun test feel more like morality plays, and Anna's death when the gun backfires shows that the game punishes the person who lied rather than the person who was lied to.

The ending leaves the Jigsaw legacy alive through a new apprentice and lets the series continue. For where it sits in the larger story, see the saw timeline guide. The next chapter is covered on saw 11.