Tarot
Tarot
Starring Harriet Slater, Jacob Batalon, Avantika, Adain Bradley
Directed by Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg
While vacationing in the Catskills for a friend's birthday, Haley (Harriet Slater) finds a box containing hand-made tarot cards, and her friends want her to do readings for them because she knows about tarot reading after her mother's passing. She reluctantly agrees because she knows she's not supposed to use the deck of a stranger, but her friends prod her on, even to the point of her reading her own future. Thinking nothing of it, the friends return home but are soon hunted down by the tarot card that Haley drew come to life, killing them one-by-one. Haley and her remaining friends fight against the clock to find a way to stop the tarot before their futures are history.
"Tarot" is one of those movies that gives horror a bad name, one that adheres to the old stereotypes that made it a laughing stock among other genres, one that sets back the elevated horror subgenre back twenty years. It's cliched, neutered, predictable, and for a script written by two people, is both simplistic and overly complicated, especially the ending that really makes everything told before it moot. It's confounding how two writers could mess things up so badly, but they obviously found a way to do it.
The film centers on your generic group of Gen-Z stock characters who's names you'll never remember (God knows I didn't) that I just related to other projects I knew them from or their generalized roles here. There's the main girl, the man girl's ex, the "Spider-Man" guy, the "Mean Girls" remake girl, the girl that looks a lot like Sadie Sink from "Stranger Things," the Hispanic, and the model/jock. That's essentially all you know about them, and care to know, because as the trailer clearly points out, they pretty much all die. That's the point of this film: showcase death in a PG-13 friendly way, which takes away any joy that could've been had by seeing gruesome R-rated goodness. When a girl is pummeled to death by a ladder, you'd want to see the outcome.
As the deaths mount, the remaining survivors, of course, do the normal horror movie thing by locating a crazy old lady who has an encyclopedic knowledge of what's happening to them, and unfortunately for iconic Irish scream queen Olwen Fouere, it's her character that they turn to (although she also did play the terrible Sally in the "Texas Chainsaw" film in 2022, so I guess she really can't pick her American horror films right - hopefully her next outing in "The Watchers" will fare better). She is a hermit, lives alone, and her house is wallpapered with newspaper clippings of past attacks where tarot cards come to life to kill their victims, as is the nature of the business. If you can't be original about one thing, why be original about anything?
To get back to the point, the film would've been at least slightly enjoyable if it was R-rated, but with a neutered PG-13 rating it takes all the fun out of what a horror film like this should be. The gore is non-existent, the murders (although mostly surprisingly inspired and unique) fall flat, and the film relies entirely on jump scares to try to scare the audiences, but the only thing it accomplishes is scaring us into a dull slumber. Even the tarot creatures themselves (which, as I learned from my research, are called Major Arcana) are a great blend of CGI and practical effects, they're hardly seen on screen to be terrifying, which is a shame because it seems a lot of work went into making them only to have them reside in the shadows for the majority of the time.
Obviously those involved in "Tarot" never went to a real reading, because they would've been warned not to make such an idiotic, simplistic film in the first place because it would be totally devoid of originality, talent, or memorability.
The Score: D-
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