From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Saw character
Adam Faulkner
Gender:	Male
Relationships:	David Tapp (employer)
First Appearance:	Saw
Cause of Death:	Suffocated with plastic wrap by Amanda Young
Portrayed by:	Leigh Whannell

Adam Faulkner was a fictional character from the Saw film series, portrayed by Saw writer and co-creator Leigh Whannell. He was prominently featured in Saw, but was also seen through various flashbacks throughout the series.

As seen in Saw film, Adam Faulkner was a headstrong and angry young man working as a freelance photographer. He was hired by David Tapp, who in the film was a discharged detective, to follow and photograph Lawrence Gordon, for $200 a night. Tapp suspected the doctor of being the Jigsaw Killer. Adam managed to follow Lawrence, and took many incriminating photos of him leaving motels where he had slept with his mistress, a student of his named Carla. Adam's occupation ended up getting him targeted by John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer himself.

During the course of the film and mainly through flashbacks, it is told how the character came to end up in the bathroom. After coming home and developing his photos of Lawrence, Adam fell asleep in his darkroom. He later awoke to find his entire apartment without light. He realized someone else was in his apartment, and used his camera flash to locate them. After letting it off, he was attacked and rendered unconscious by a person in a pig mask. Throughout the series it was gradually revealed that it was in fact Amanda Young who abducted Adam, having also been the one who dragged him to his test.

As shown in Saw III, Amanda brought Adam to a grimy industrial bathroom where everything else had been prepared by Jigsaw for a complicated test. Chaining him at the ankle to a pipe, Amanda placed Adam on his back in a bathtub filled with water. According to the original script, Amanda tied the cord to the bathtub stopper to Adam's ankle (not instructed by Jigsaw to do so) and tossed the key on his stomach before leaving the room after turning the lights off.

Amanda shown dragging Adam into his test.

After waking up in the bathroom, Adam scrambled from the bathtub, pulling the stopper and sending the key down the drain. Adam then discovered that he and his "cellmate", Dr. Lawrence Gordon, were the latest victims in a game created by Jigsaw.

Throughout the film, the two characters went through an arc of psychological anxiety. When the film began, it is Adam who was screaming and anxious, desperate to find a way out of his shackles, with Lawrence being the one trying to calm him down. But as the film progressed, and the plot with Lawrence's family developed, it became Lawrence who snapped and ended up slicing off his own foot to escape the trap.

During the scenes of the film inside the bathroom, the two characters worked together on several occasions to try and find an escape route. These included the cassette player, the hacksaws in the toilet, turning off the lights to find an X in glow-in-the-dark paint, and even faking Adam's death. This formulated a relationship between the two characters that flowed up and down during the film, with the two conspiring and joking, whilst at other times there was serious distrust between the two as it was shown that they had a deeper connection with each other than previously thought. This plot line climaxed with Lawrence shooting Adam in the shoulder after believing it was necessary to save his wife and daughter, who had been kidnapped under Jigsaw's orders.

Another flashback of Amanda killing Adam.

However, after Adam managed to kill Zep, an orderly from Dr. Gordon's hospital believed to be the one responsible for the bathroom trap, by beating him over the head with a toilet lid, Adam and Lawrence went through a final emotional moment together, with Lawrence leaving, promising to find help for Adam. Here a deeper side was shown to Adam as he was sobbing and genuinely afraid of being left alone in the bathroom. Still under the idea that Zep was the Jigsaw Killer, he was then proven to be a red herring after finding a tape player in Zep's jacket that spoke about Zep's test. Turning it off before it finished, Adam came to the final realization that the Jigsaw Killer had been actually masquerading as the corpse inside the room. Jigsaw pointed out that the key to Adam's chain was inside the bathtub where he awoke in the first scene of the film. Jigsaw then left, shutting the door and sealing the character's ultimate fate.

Adam's decomposed corpse as seen in Saw II.

In Saw II, it was revealed that Adam did in fact die, after Daniel and Amanda found his rotting corpse.

It is revealed in the third film that Amanda, Jigsaw's apprentice, was the one who kidnapped Adam and placed him in the bathtub for Jigsaw as her first task. In a deleted scene, Adam was handing out flyers in the lobby of his apartment building when he met Amanda. He complimented her "rock star" hair and invited her to go to his buddy's band's show later that night, which she declined. Amanda later sneaked into his apartment in Jigsaw's pig outfit, ambushed Adam, and brought him to the infamous bathroom. Later, Amanda, shaken with guilt, returned to the bathroom. She assured Adam she was going to rescue him, at which point she suffocated him with a plastic sheet as way of mercy-killing.

• Adam at the Internet Movie Database