Tarot Review

The world of Tarot card reading and fortune telling serves as the subject matter for Tarot, an adaptation of the horror Horrorscope.

A group of college friends spend a weekend in the mansion in the Catskill Mountains to celebrate Elise’s (Larsen Thompson) birthday. Whilst up there the group discovers a special deck of hand-drawn tarot cards and they convince Haley (Harriet Slater) to perform a tarot reading. This reading awakens a malicious spirit and it starts picking off the group one by one. The survivors must figure out a way to end their curse before it ends them.

Recently there have been horror movies that have paid homage to the past. X was a slasher influenced by ‘70s exploitation and pornographic films, Thanksgiving was an old-fashioned holiday slasher, and Immaculate was a modern nunsploitation film. Tarot was on the other side of the coin because it was a throwback in the worst possible way. It felt like it came out in the ‘90s and the decade was not a great period for horror films. The setup was about young people, which was common for horror films, and the glossy cinematography and MTV editing were hallmarks of the ‘90s and noughties.

Tarot was also following some of the worst modern trends in the horror genre. Blumhouse has focused on making PG-13, teen horror films. Their recent output has included Five Nights at Freddy’s, Night Swim, and Imaginary which have been profitable, although Night Swim and Imaginary didn’t bring in megabucks like their other films. Tarot was produced by Screen Gems which is a division of Sony Pictures and they have often made horror films. They follow a similar business model to Blumhouse where they make films on a budget with the aim to maximise a potential profit. Some of their titles included Don’t Breathe, Searching, and The Pope’s Exorcist. The quality of their films can vary.

Tarot follows the template that a number of recent horror films have followed. In Tarot a group of young people find out they are cursed or targeted by an entity. This template was used in Smile, The Boogeyman, It Lives Inside, Night Swim, and Imaginary. The only spin Tarot managed was showing the characters quickly realising they were cursed and needed to figure out how to prevent their deaths. Yet the characters were given advise on how to survive the curse and they still ignored it. Olwen Fouéré played an older character who had experience with the tarot cards and it was similar to Lin Shaye’s role in the Insidious films.  As the film progressed it broke its own rules and logic, especially at the end.

The film’s characters fell into two camps: bland or annoying. There was an attempt at characterisation with Haley having a tragic backstory and she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Grant (Adain Bradley), but she wasn’t interesting enough. Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz) was the token douchebag of the group so audiences were rooting for his death. The other character that needed to be killed off was Jacob Batalon’s Paxton since he was the annoying comedic relief. The most impressive member of the cast was Avantika who played Paige. Avantika was giving the film more effort than it deserved since she was a decent girl who suffered from grief and fear. Avantika is a rising star so Tarot should be a minor entry in her career.

Tarot was a horror film that did everything wrong. There was no invention or creativity with it story or characters, it had a screenplay filled with holes and had no scares or tension.