Tarot (2024), directed by Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg, stars Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, Jacob Batalon, Avantika, Humberly Gonzalez, Larsen Thompson, Wolfgang Novogratz, and Olwen Fouere. The film follows a group of friends, who after reading one another’s fortunes with a deck a ancient tarot cards, unleash a terrifying evil intent on violent revenge. After the friends begin to die in ways prophesied by their tarot cards, the survivors band together to reverse the curse as well as solve the mystery of its origin. 

The performances here range from noticeably lifeless to inoffensive/serviceable, but no one stands out besides maybe Jacob Batalon in the chubby, single best-friend, comic relief role. That being said, I think this has more to do with the actor’s natural charm than the strength of the character on paper. The film’s central romance between Haley (Slater) and Grant (Bradley) is the story’s central emotional element, so it’s too bad it feels extremely cliche and inauthentic. Speaking of crappy romances/performances, there’s a scene where a loved one of Humberly Gonzalez’s character dies and she can’t even shed a tear. She just seems ok with it.  On top of this, characters often become inexplicably dumb at the worst possible moments. I mean, these characters are told how they’ll die, and they still fail to avoid it. It’s not clever, it’s frustrating and makes the characters seem unintelligent and therefore unlikeable.

The film’s dialogue often tries way too hard to make the characters seem like hip teenagers, but in reality just makes them seem unintelligent once again. As mentioned earlier, the characters’ inability to avoid fates that are told to them in advance makes them seem extremely dumb, but more importantly, it eliminates a lot of tension from the film. We’re told more or less how the characters will die, so when it happens with zero twists or subversions, it quickly becomes a grating experience. Not to mention, the film’s relentless marketing spoiled almost every kill in the movie, so that pretty much brought the experience down a couple of notches immediately. 

Thankfully, the film features some serviceably creepy ghost/creature designs as well as some surprisingly mean deaths for being rated PG-13. Unfortunately, the film adopts a much less serious tone in sequences in between. The character development and comedy in these scenes rarely work and don’t blend well with the scarier sequences. It’s as if the film can’t decide what it wants to be.

Overall, this a horror film filled with cliches that fail to take advantage of it original horror premise. That being said, the film isn’t laughably bad, just unoriginal and forgettable. At least it features some decent kills and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. I can’t recommend it to anyone, but I probably won’t beg them to stay away from it either. It feels like the kind of movie that should have been rated R and released in 1999. There’s a scene here where a character runs past the dead body of another character who she already watched die, stops, and makes a point to scream at the body for a second time as if it’s some new revelation. The moment perfectly encapsulates Tarot‘s inability to find anything new to offer the horror genre. It lacks so much creativity, it reuses the same scares without a hint of irony. D