TAROT - Mark Reviews Movies

Tarot, Screen Gems

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 3, 2024

It's worth noting that Tarot doesn't open in the common tradition of horror movies. It certainly seems as if it might, as a group of friends are gathered at a remote mansion and find an especially creepy deck of tarot cards in a locked cellar. One of them wanders off alone, and the expectation is that this character or maybe another will meet a grisly fate by whatever is unleashed by using those cards.

Writers/directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, though, refrain from the obvious, which is refreshing. Instead, we get to watch as the friends have their fortunes read by Haley (Harriet Slater), whose traumatic back story has made her an expert in astrology and tarot and the super-duper mystical power of combining the two things. That's dull enough, and after catching that a lot of Haley's words seem to be loaded with foreshadowing for when these characters are inevitably picked off one by one, the exercise starts to feel a bit like studying for a test. Will we remember enough of this to notice how specifically these fortunes will come true? Is there really any reason to care?

The movie is a strange concoction of ideas—about how these characters are fated to die, how maybe they're not supposed to except for a curse placed on the deck, and not at all about destiny and hexes because all of the victims are killed by monsters in the form of figures from the tarot cards. The basic plot is the usual stuff, as the survivors determine what's happening to them, what supernatural thing is causing it, and trying to determine a way to stop it—with plenty of exposition and flashbacks and lucky speculation about rules making up most of the dialogue.

The death scenes, meanwhile, almost seem to have been imagined after the fact. The first one, for example, has Elsie (Larsen Thompson), the first of the gang to have her fortune read (The script suggests that the order is a hard and fast rule, except when it has to contradict that for the climax to happen), wandering her sorority house at night. After hearing footsteps and laughter in the attic, Elsie climbs a ladder to inspect upstairs, spends way too much time up there for all the spooky and inexplicable things that occur while she's balancing awkwardly, and is startled to the ground by one of the monstrous tarot figures.

It slams the ladder on her body repeatedly, and as if they're reciting lines from a first draft that had a completely different notion for how these deaths would occur, the cops mention there was no sign of foul play. Do they think the ladder repeatedly raised and forcefully dropped on its own?

Ignoring the suspicion that the filmmakers either switched ideas during filming or didn't think through the basics of their premise in the first place, there is something to these scenes of supernatural terror and death that's better than the routine plot and bland characters surrounding them. Sure, most of them revolve around jump-scares, with the stingy score doing a lot of the work in that department.

However, it's also darkly amusing that two of the characters die directly as a result of literally jumping because they're scared. There's the bit with ladder, obviously, and next, another character is so startled by a different monster that he jumps in front of a speeding subway train.

This is either patently silly or intentionally so, and let's give the filmmakers, making their feature debuts, the benefit of the doubt here. After all, they do possess an obvious sense of humor about some of these deaths, such as one character being haunted by the tarot deck's Hanging Man, which taunts her to run by way of the hangman letter-guessing game. It's such a deliberate and, more importantly, morbid joke that it almost excuses how the character runs anyway, despite everyone around her reminding her that she just watched a video of the tarot reading in which Haley explicitly told her not to run. If Cohen and Halberg are having a laugh at how dumb the characters in horror movies typically are, that's a decent punch line, too.

If the filmmakers are winking and nudging, though, they might have made it just a bit plainer to notice. The plotting is too straightforward and self-serious about the gimmick to see it as a joke (even though it has Olwen Fouéré's keeper of exposition explaining, in admirable deadpan, that sometimes the Death card does just mean death), and the characters remain too bland, even and especially if they're meant to be the butt of a joke. It is amusing to watch the comic relief be tormented by the tarot's Fool (in a scene that actually succeeds at being a bit unsettling, too), just as the Magician's killing method, on a magically appearing stage in front of a ghoulish audience, is devilishly weird.

The stranger moments of Tarot are enticing. They're mainly so, though, in hinting at a much odder and potentially better movie than the inconsistent one we get here.

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