PIECES

Ten-year-old Timmy Reston is berated by his mother for playing with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. After she orders him to dispose of the puzzle, he returns with an axe, murders her, then dismembers her body with a hacksaw. When the police arrive, Timmy hides in a closet and pretends to be a witness to the crime. The police believe Timmy's story and he is sent to live with his aunt. 40 years later, after witnessing a female skateboarder smash into a mirror, a black-clad figure opens a box containing a photograph of Timmy's mother and her bloodied dress. He takes out the bloodied jigsaw puzzle and starts to put it together.

A female student studying on the lawn of her Boston university is decapitated with a chainsaw by an unidentified killer who steals her head. Lt. Bracken and his partner, Sgt. Holden, investigate the murder. Arthur Brown, a reserved professor of anatomy who is teased by students for being homosexual, gives the detectives a tour of the school, where the groundskeeper, Willard, is trimming hedges with a chainsaw. A student, Kendall, receives a note from a female classmate to meet her at the pool for sex, but the killer sends Kendall a fake note to divert him and then murders the girl with a chainsaw. Willard arrives on the scene and is arrested as a suspect after the police find a chainsaw by the victim, missing her torso, at the pool. Professor Brown inspects the remains, and is briefly considered a suspect.

Dr. Jennings meets with Kendall at the station in hopes that he can help provide a profile of the murderer. Bracken brings in undercover officer and former tennis pro Mary Riggs to pose as a tennis instructor at the college, with Kendall's assistance. Reporter Sylvia Costa is stonewalled by Bracken. That evening, the killer stalks a student and saws her arms off inside an elevator just before Kendall and the police arrive, then stabs Sylvia to death on a waterbed.

One of Mary's tennis students, Suzie, is chased down in the locker room by the killer and sawed in half. While Mary and Kendall focus on turning off blasting music the killer turned on as a diversion, the killer escapes with Suzie's legs. Kendall theorizes that the killer is a faculty member, since he knows when and where to strike while avoiding police. They discover that the dean changed his name and that his mother was brutally murdered; the dean is Timmy.

Meanwhile, Mary is drugged with a paralytic substance by Timmy at his apartment. He attempts to saw off her feet, since the previous victim's feet did not fit in his mother's shoes. Bracken, Holden, and Kendall burst into Timmy's apartment. He is shot dead by Bracken while Kendall rescues Mary.

After finding the jigsaw puzzle in Timmy's apartment, Holden jokes to Kendall about joining the police and leans on a bookshelf, which spins around to reveal Timmy's human puzzle, a decomposing body made of pieces of his victims stitched together in his mother's dress, which falls out onto Kendall. The shaken Kendall turns to leave with Holden, but the jigsaw corpse inexplicably comes to life, grabbing and crushing Kendall's genitalia as he screams.

The killer is revealed as the dean, Timmy Reston, who is shot dead while attempting to claim another victim. The authorities discover his gruesome human jigsaw puzzle, a decomposing body stitched together from his victims, hidden in his apartment.

The climax ties the childhood trauma directly to the campus murders, as Timmy's obsession with recreating his mother's image manifests in his mutilation of students. The final reveal of the stitched-together body literalizes the film’s puzzle motif, providing a grotesque payoff for the killer’s twisted project and cementing the film’s reputation for audacious shocks.