Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Spiral: From the Book of Saw.

Wow! How’s that for a hard cut to the credits? 

While we didn’t get a gravel-throated “Game over,” instead enjoying Max Minghella’s smug-ass Nu-Jigsaw face as he hits us with the “Shh,” there’s no understating the visceral impact of Spiral: From the Book of Saw’s final moments. Even in a franchise marked by its gut-punching plot twists occurring mere moments before a film’s end, Spiral plays particularly, thrillingly ruthless with its blunt conclusions and formal knife wounds. But after the warehouse dust settles on Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson’s bullet-riddled, blood-drained body, what does this final scene mean beyond its very effective shock value? 

RELATED: How to Watch the 'Saw' Movies In Order (Chronologically and By Release Date)

So there’s a killer terrorizing Metro City, who is not the long-dead Jigsaw Killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell not even blessing us in a credit stinger), but does seem to borrow a lot of his iconography, propensity for over-engineered traps, and moralistic justifications for who he targets, to the point of giving them a “chance” to escape. This go around, the killer is targeting a particular branch of the Metro City Police Department, trapping and punishing corrupt cops who behave as though they are above the law. This domino effect of misconduct seems to have begun with one original sin: The murder of an unarmed, corrupt cop-implicating witness (Frank Licari) by Detective Zeke Banks’ (Chris Rock) original partner Pete Dunleavy (Patrick McManus). Zeke snitches Pete and sends him to prison, making Zeke a pariah of his thin-blue-line-loving precinct in the process, as “being a cop” trumps “basic human morality” in the MCPD. 

Chris Rock and Max Minghella in Spiral: From the Book of Saw
Image via Lionsgate

As the new killer picks off these bad cops one after the other, Zeke and his new, rookie partner Detective William Schenk (Minghella) run on a wild collection of clues, gruesome crime scenes, and ever-increasingly personal stakes — including the disappearance of Zeke’s father Marcus (Jackson), the former captain of this precinct. Finally, at the lowest of his low, including the skinning of his new partner and the face-burning-spine-splitting of his new captain (Marisol Nichols), Zeke gets himself captured by this new killer at one of those classic Saw “giant abandoned warehouses full of flesh-ripping goodies.” After picking the lock of his chained up arm (instead of sawing the arm off; sorry ‘bout it, Dr. Gordon), Zeke finds Pete tied up and hanging by the ceiling, ready to get a bunch of broken glass shot out at him by some kind of home-brewed gatling gun. Zeke does his best to save Pete, but the glass wins — and gets stuck all over Zeke’s body to boot. 

Then Zeke makes his way to another room in the warehouse, and we all find out who this new killer is: Detective William Schenk. That’s right; Zeke’s new, by-the-book, recently skinned and murdered partner William is not only alive, but this new Jigsaw copycat killing all these dirty cops. With the help of some classic Saw “recontextualized flashbacks,” William explains that Pete actually shot and killed his father all those years ago — and Zeke even spoke to and comforted him as a child (Leonidas Castrounis) post-murder. William, bolstered by the philosophy of John Kramer, then began his long road to revenge, reform, and hopeful partnership with Zeke. He passed his way through the academy and training, became a junior detective, got himself assigned to Zeke’s precinct, and began killing Zeke’s corrupted, disrespectful colleagues one by one (even putting his own recognizable tattoo on one of the victims, to fool Zeke into thinking he was dead). Jigsaw unnecessarily stopped at the individual, William believes, but the two of them can turn his moralistic vendettas into systemic change. These cops clearly don’t want the chance to pass their tests to a better lived life, as evidenced by William revealing Pete’s test was actually Zeke’s test; the “right way” to play that game would be not to try and save him at all. Under William’s proposal, Zeke gives William info on a new bad cop, William does his fake Jigsaw thing, and pretty soon, the MCPD is reformed out of fear.

Zeke — likely lying but maybe finding William’s philosophy a little tempting — says he’ll agree to this plan so long as William gives him his father back. William then calls 911 and shoots wildly in the air, assuring the police are on their way, then takes Zeke to his final game: His father Marcus suspended in midair, small metal wires embedded into his skin, blood draining slowly into a series of containers. William reveals that Marcus is a central figure of the MCPD’s corruption; Marcus insists that Zeke shoot William immediately; Zeke freaks out, understandably, at the whole circumstance. So William, continuing to assert dominance of this third act, gives Zeke the rules of his game. If he wants his father to die, he can follow his father’s advice and shoot William. But if he wants his father to survive, he can instead simply shoot a spiral-shaped device just above them. As Zeke contemplates his options, all under the ticking clock of the police showing up any minute, we see a very telling shot of a trip-wire attached to the warehouse door, and William sneaking his way toward an elevator…

Bang! Zeke shoots the spiral device, which sends his father to the ground. Zeke rushes over to help him, to try and rid him from his weird metallic wires and hookups, all the while the cops get closer and closer to the door. Marcus tries to communicate, through a croaked out whisper, that the door should not be open under any circumstance, but it’s too late. The police fling open the door, confused at the chaos they’re seeing. Zeke tries to scream that they’re both cops. But then: William’s final step of his game is put into place. When the cops opened the door, the trip-wire activated a bunch of separate wires still attached to Marcus, flinging him to his feet like one of William’s macabre pig-police-puppets. And that’s when Zeke remembers one of those pig-police-puppets slowly raising a gun. And that’s when Marcus, out of his control, slowly raises a gun in his hand at the cops in front of him. The police open fire like hell on Marcus, Zeke stares at William, William gives that “Shh” as he exits down the service elevator, and bang, it’s over!

Max Minghella in Spiral: From the Book of Saw
Image via Lionsgate

A couple of thematic questions arise from this ending (and this is, indeed, the “ending,” as there is no post-credit stinger teasing the already greenlit Saw X). For one, this feels very much to me like an unbeatable game, a trap designed to murder Marcus no matter what happens. Zeke followed our new killer’s instructions, but Marcus was still rigged to raise his gun, causing his own police force to gun him down. John “I never killed anyone” Kramer would never make an inherently unwinnable game; it goes against his whole philosophy, and he’s explicitly admonished his “disciples” for doing so. For William to differentiate himself by crafting such pure murder devices out of a purer need for revenge and cleansing is an intriguing wrinkle to the franchise’s relationship with morality, and serves as a canny exploration of the idea that these tests have been for Zeke, not the trapped folks, all along. The goal isn’t to give a chance to these dirty cops to escape; the goal is to give Zeke a chance not to help them escape, to realize the whole bunch of apples is spoiled, to take his existing philosophy of morality and use it as a weapon. Zeke, in his unwavering commitment to saving his father, fails. So he pays the price, not pure enough for William’s broader utilization of the Jigsaw ethos.

The bigger question raised throughout the film, and especially in this charged, violent ending, comes from the film’s examinations and conclusions (or lack thereof) surrounding police brutality and race. It is a beyond incendiary choice to end a film with the image of a group of police officers gunning down a Black man because they think he’s armed (he technically is, but it is very much out of his control), and beyond incendiary to hard-cut after it happens; William going down the elevator is an apt visualization of this film saying “Nope, we’re not gonna deal with this image we just produced, bye!” In fact, with just a couple of exceptions, the issues of race, of Black people being cops in an era when cops are targeting Black people, of how the identity of a cop can warp someone so severely they no longer care about basic human dignity, are not explicitly discussed even as the plot barrels us through tons of discussions of police corruption and systemic change and punishment and whatnot.

In some ways, I agree with my colleague Matt Goldberg that this feels like an annoyingly underbaked way to discuss such a charged issue, to use it for dressing rather than a meal unto itself. There’s even a cynical reading of the film’s relationship to these issues; by presenting the trappings of “police corruption” without ever mentioning how they’re explicitly tracked to issues of race, but still ending the film on an image echoing so many racially motivated police murders, Spiral can earn some grittiness without alienating any potential audience members who would immediately cry “Woke!” at any piece of entertainment that dares to be explicitly political (despite the fact that the Saw franchise has been explicitly political since film one, perhaps peaking with Saw VI’s destruction of the predatory nature of the American healthcare system). 

At the same time, from the moment this film ended to literally right now, I’ve pretty much thought only about the film’s ending, what it’s trying to say, whether William’s methods have some kind of brutal point, and how Zeke will go on to feel about this beyond his shocked visage during the final frames. I love when a film makes its audience do some work, when a film shows, and doesn’t tell, a series of go-for-broke images and ideas and asks its audience to make sense and patterns out of them. Perhaps the film purposefully refrains from saying “the corrupt police are racist” because it simply wants to show a narrative involving the corrupt police, and wants us to do the rest of the work ourselves (a task I am more than up for, a task I believe will give this film a particularly long tail, especially after the forgettably apolitical Jigsaw). Or perhaps the film wants to exist primarily as a hardboiled bit of escapism, a film where Black folks can exist in a “gritty police horror-thriller” without wanting or needing to reckon with Black folks’ real-life relationship with the police, a film where the depiction of “Black pain” is not as important as the depiction of, well, simply “pain.”

Chris Rock in Spiral: From the Book of Saw
Image via Lionsgate

Will Saw X continue William’s journey as our new killer? Will Zeke descend further into madness, either chasing William down or becoming a killer himself? Will more systemic traumas be dissected and dealt with — or specifically not dealt with? Or will we slam into a new story, one that either gives us more John Kramer, one of his disciples, or an absolutely brand new killer? Spiral has added some new rules to the game, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out next — before hard-cutting to the credits again, of course. 

KEEP READING: ‘Spiral’ Director Darren Lynn Bousman Describes a Trap So Gruesome It Had to be Deleted