Chris Capel’s short film Living with Jigsaw imagines the ideal roommate scenario: sharing a house with the creepy mascot of the Saw movies.
The concept has the potential to be a one-note joke, but Capel (one of the Project Greenlight finalists) imbues it with a great sense of life by varying the absurd situations the roommate, Gary, finds himself in. There’s a beautiful blend of deadly malice (a floor covered in razor blades!) and the cold banality of household items (Gillette, the best a murderous puppet can get). Plus, it helps that the key figure is a tiny doll made more and more adorable as we see how ineffective he is in a domestic setting.
You get the sense that the drop-kickable puppet watched the human Jigsaw’s ingeniously deadly machinations and has tried to recreate them on his scale. Which is minuscule. And wonderfully low-stakes.
The best part of the short film comes when Jigsaw channels Party Cat, but at only two minutes, Living with Jigsaw manages to nail a lot of fantastically funny situations. It’s excellent. An Odd Couple flare and a villain whose hand you’d have to shake with your thumb and forefinger.
Hat tip to Aaron Morgan for this one.