Maybe tarot really does show you the future? After the big card reading scene to start the movie, I could predict exactly how it was going to play out, and also how I was going to feel about it.
One particularly insightful (and handsome) horror movie reviewer on the internet recently wrote about the current trend of “glossy, halfway-neutered, PG-13 fright flicks with limited ambitions.” I have it on good authority that they didn’t specifically have Tarot in mind when that was written, but they might as well have. This movie is Just. So. Lazy. Like, “lazier than the laziest Blumhouse film” lazy. It’s the first script I’ve come across that I could almost be convinced was entirely written by Artificial Intelligence, except that at it’s current level of sophistication even AI would make a baffling or unexpected decision at some point. I can’t point to a single concept, character choice, or line of dialogue in Tarot that surprised me, to the point that the entire thing in its totality actually surprised me in its unwavering commitment to blandness.
So, yep, I obviously didn’t like this too much. I’ll start with whatever positives I can scrape together. There was one kill towards the end of the film that got me somewhat invested. It involved a macabre magic show set piece, where one of the characters ended up sawed in half for real in front of an audience of vacant-eyed ghouls. It was the kill with the most ambition and I did feel sympathy for the character, although I couldn’t describe a single trait about their personality. A couple of the tarot demon designs were decent, particularly the first one we see. That’s pretty much it for the positives though. Oh, did I confuse you by talking about the tarot demons before discussing the plot? No, of course not, because you could describe the plot of this movie based entirely off of the movie poster, possibly just the title. A group of college-age friends discovers a mysterious deck of tarot cards, and conduct a reading. They are then picked off one-by-one by monsters that resemble the main card in each of their readings. Now, this is far from the first horror flick to make easy choices, and sometimes the simplest concepts are the best. My real problem with the movie is that the easiest choice is the only choice being made along every step of the way.
Tarot is not willing to grant its audience the slightest bit of trust. The plot is the opposite of opaque, and yet so much of the dialogue is spent with characters restating things that we already know, or questioning things that were patently obvious on their face. When it comes time to uncover the mystery of how the evil tarot deck came to be, there is no investigation needed. Basically, the characters google “evil tarot deck”, come up with a website run by a spooky old lady that lives within driving distance, and then go to her house where she immediately lays out the entire backstory in a convenient little exposition package. Thankfully, our characters have no need to use their wits or sacrifice anything to get that information, or else they might be forced to grow or evolve. Then, after that entire explanation which tidies up all of the open questions, some of the friends still don’t believe it. Naturally, they have to hash it out even further so that the script-writers aren’t burdened by filling the space with any actual character development.
I recently read or listened to someone (can’t recall the source) discuss the idea of streaming services purposely making content that is intended to be half-ignored while you are scrolling on your phone. This is the major movie studio version of that. I couldn’t imagine watching this in a theater without distractions. I found it annoying and disappointing from my couch, with access to conversations with my family and personal electronic devices, etc. I think I would have found it infuriating in a setting where I had to give it my full attention.
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