When it comes to horror, tone is absolute. From the stripped back, minimalist, slow burn social commentary of your average A24 flick, to the more populist leanings of a blockbusting ghost story like The Conjuring, if you can’t maintain a consistent tone from beginning to end, you’re essentially dead before you even start. Oh, the tone can shift of course, but the more organic you an make it, the more you hold the audience in the palm of your hand.
This brings us to jump-scaring, card shuffler, Tarot, a new frightener that sort of blends the weaponized fate of Final Destination with the multi-ghoul offerings of Thirteen Ghosts with a touch of James Wan thrown in for good measure. However, with screenwriters-turned-directors Anna Halberg and Spencer Cohen dealing out the cards, can they provide a horror flick that’ll prove to be a successful draw?
Seven students have rented out a creepy old house in the middle of nowhere to celebrate one of their number’s birthday, but when everyone realises that the booze supply has dwindled and that they’re too remote to order in more, they do what any normal, intelligent, twentysomething does in that situation – the break into forbidden areas of the house and to screw around with an ornate set of tarot card they find.
While I wait for you to stop reeling at this supreme act of cinematic stupidity, I guess I’ll take the time to introduce you to this confederacy of obvious geniuses and leading the pack is your obvious final girl with a tragic past, her recently ex-boyfriend, a class clown, a trio of girls only indistinguishable by their ethnicity and a random jock whose whole personality seems to be centred on the fact that he’s willing to eat food off the ground. Anyway, as one of their number actually has tarot reading experience, she gives each of her friends, and herself, readings that all sound legit enough – ah, but wouldn’t ya know it, the deck is cursed by an ancient witchy type and whatever misshapen creature that is detailed on the fortune card you drew will eventually show up and kill them one at a time.
This, obviously, proves to be a shocking revelation, but as their number start dying in funky accidents actually caused by a bunch of Conjuring-style spirits with names like The Magician, The Fool and The Hangman, somehow their survival instincts somehow get worse instead of better.
Figuring out what is happening thanks to that unsung hero of lazy writing – the internet – the survivors start to try and figure out how to nullify their individual curses, but as time runs out they may have to play the hand they’ve been dealt.
So, all that waffle I was going on about earlier concerning tone was obviously a thinly veiled dig at the fact that Tarot is content to be one of those rather vapid entries that only cares about delivering a rapid fire rate of cheap jump scares, a clutch of cool looking ghouls and a group of protagonists that are either good looking or funny enough to deserve to make it to the end credits. If taken entirely on these standards (or if you’re twelve years old) Tarot stands as an underachieving, but fairly successful venture that ticks off its meager successes with aplomb.
However, to anyone with more stringent horror tastes, Tarot ends up being the kind of dopey, basic affair you could have sworn died out in the 2000s that is completely willing to overturn any genuine scares or tension if the comic relief in their midst thought up a cool improv on the day. Step forward Jacob Batalon (aka. Ned Leeds from the MCU Spider-Man movies) who seems to be having genuine fun doing his usual schtick whether it harms the movie or not. However, while hes the most watchable and likable presence in the movie by far, without a presence like Tom Holland, Zendaya, or a CGI lizard-man to bounce off, his endless, meta-jokes not only feel carbon dated to around 1996, but it unravels any scare within two hundred miles of him. Still, being the worst thing for the film isn’t so bad if you’re also the most entertaining thing in the film – so I guess he’s all square…
What doesn’t come off particularly well is a stunningly shoddy script which takes such huge leaps of logic, I was convinced it was part flea. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the film was co-directed by one of the screenwriters of Moonfall, but a scene where the characters sit in a room and figure out exactly what is happening to them – and manage to confirm it online – in under five minutes flat may be one of the most laughably constructed scenes I’ll see all year. But just in case they needed extra clarification, they even include a stock scene where they find a grizzled expert with previous experience with the cursed deck (again, using a search engine and finding the exact results first time – which is highly ironic considering that, at the time of writing, you can’t even find the character’s names on IMDb), who fills in those narrative gaps with tedious ease.
As for the monsters? Well, they certainly are a cool looking bunch, but it soon becomes obvious that despite some appropriately gnarly looks, they’re not that different from one another. Featuring such elaborate non de plumes as The Hangman or The Hermit or The High Priestess, they mostly seem to have exactly the same MO of suddenly showing up while screaming directly into character, but with the distinction of a rope or a lantern to properly separate them. However, considering the movie tends to have the creepy bastards go for their victims in the most convoluted of fashions (one character who is described as “climbing the ladder of success” is killed by – you guessed it – a ladder), you wish these ethereal motherfuckers came with more suitable names like The Competent Writer or The Script Editor.
Still, even though some of its story telling choices are the worst kind of hocus bogus (the ending will make you audibly groan out loud), it’s still watchable enough in its own way. The production values are nice and slick, the effects are cool and a newborn baby could follow the plot, but lazy scares, and a lack of originality or a true edge means that even at it’s best, I foretell that Tarot (emphasis on “rot”) might not have the best of futures ahead of it.
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