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As a supernatural slasher, Tarot feels way too standard in how deals out a predictable dose of horror. It comes as advertised for posing tarot card readings that lead to a series of strange murders. There’s a handful of characters who get picked off one by one, but none of them are worth rooting for as they more pastiche than people. They are puppets in a horror film that never bothers to put effort in the string of familiar motions.
It’s a familiar story as some beer-chugging friends celebrate at a rented mansion. Searching for something to do, they run across a mysterious deck of tarot cards. For laughs, they have the magic-believing Haley (Harriet Slater) do some readings for them. There’s some tension considering that her ex-boyfriend, Grant (Adain Bradley), is among the friends and he gets a bit of a dire reading. Haley insists that she’s not faking the readings to be more personal and that she’s just doing what the cards tell her. How I wish she wasn’t lying, if only to add some better drama into this dull framework.
Soon after this party, the group starts getting killed off in ways that the tarot cards dictated. There’s no clever twist to how the readings are given, where the characters have to solve the mystery behind the cards. One of the unfortunate friends gets a reading that they shouldn’t stray off tracks and is then killed by an oncoming train. The ultimate mystery behind the creation of the cards is not all that engaging. There’s an old herald who lets them in on the lore of the deadly cards and how they lead all who use them to a deadly fate.
This struggle against fate feels more boring than a game of Bridge. There’s attempts at comic relief but never anything clever, relying on personality-free quips all along the way. The usually amusing Jacob Batalon is not given much to work with here and his charm can’t work miracles on a script this dull. The jokes are as lackluster as the PG-13 kills, considering the killer of a supernatural jester is not all that frightening or compelling. It makes sense to bury this tired monster within the abundance of darkness that makes everything hard to see. In more visible lighting, this figure would be seen as little more than a forgettable B-movie boogeyman.
Tarot draws the cards of tired, tedius, and tepid for this routine horror. Not a single moment of joking around or spilling blood works. One of the final lines of the film is “fuck fate,” as the survivors do not accept the cards they are dealt. If only the movie had that same sense of rebelliousness and was unwilling to accept a routine and flavorless script.
