“She’s a Pisces, they always run away!” cries Haley (Harriet Slater) as she chases her friend, Madeline (Humberly González). This is just one of several lines of dialogue that caused my soul to leave my body during the brisk, 92 minute runtime of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s Tarot. Choosing to not even try to be a good film, this laugh-out-loud horror flick instead goes for broke with its ridiculous premise that tarot cards, zodiac signs, and the insane hormones swirling throughout your late teens/early twenties are somehow all part of the grander scheme.
And Haley? She’s a tarot card reader, one that’s been doing it since her mom died, and her crew of silly friends (with some very interesting and grounded relationships) are gonna die one by one because she used an evil tarot deck for a reading. Now, did this deck need to be evil? No, because it’s established early that it’s simply bad luck to do a reading with someone else’s tarot deck. Is it awesome that there is an insane, ghost-vengeance backstory for those cards? Hell yes, and Tarot is so confident in this nonsense that it breaks through any real criticisms I had because it’s such a damn good time.
It’s even better because tarot and zodiac signs have nothing to do with each other but…why not? We soldier on.
That plucky crew is made up of Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz), Madeline, Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Paige (Avantika), and Elise (Larsen Thompson). It’s a cute dynamic, with Batalon playing basically the older version of his Spider-man character, Ned, while Lucas and Madeline are that adorable twosome that everyone knows is a thing and they haven’t quite figured it out themselves. Paige and Elise are fun as well, rounding out this group vacation as in a cabin in the woods.
Oh, and Haley’s ex-boyfriend Grant (Adain Bradley) is also there. They haven’t told anyone they broke up yet but he’s totes being SUPER chill about it (he’s a bag of dicks).
Haley’s reading winds up getting a lot of people killed. Whether it’s because the deck is evil, as proclaimed by occult expert Alma Astron (The Watchers‘ Olwen Fouéré), is up to interpretation since apparently you also shouldn’t use someone else’s deck. Alma’s been looking to save the world from this affliction for years but…it’s just too damn entertaining for viewers to watch, so she’s been unsuccessful so far.
The young adults start getting picked off one-by-one, often in some truly fun ways. There’s a tinge of Final Destination, or at least its self-aware later sequels. There’s a fun attic ladder kill, a good subway murder, and the best lines of the film (quoted above) occurs during a kill by “The Hangman.” They’re all really fun, so it’s a shame I can’t see jack shit through the film’s intensely dark color palette. I had to turn my TV’s brightness up a bit as the lighting on this film is almost nonexistent. It’s sort of funny that two years after Jordan Peele’s Nope showed us the best “day-for-night” horror photography of all time that films like Tarot and Imaginary are so hard to watch. Pity, as it’s the biggest flaw in an otherwise wildly stupid and entertaining film.
This is not a good movie. It’s ridiculous, makes little sense, has issues sticking to its own lore, and needs someone to hold a candle or a lantern or turn on a light or something. That said, what things CAN be seen are quite well shot by Elie Smolkin (2020’s The Stand TV series). Add that into the stew with a slew of frankly wonderful, grounded performances delivering insane dialogue with the utmost sincerity, and turns out Tarot is a pretty fun time. Seriously, it’s entertaining and it’s only 92 minutes long!
Tarot is available to rent/buy in all the usual places and is, startlingly, still playing in select theatres.
WRITE DRUNK; EDIT DRUNK 