Tarot review: A flimsy horror flick with an identity crisis

“Frustrating” is a word that came to mind a lot while watching Tarot, the new horror film from directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg based on Nicholas Adams’ 1992 novel Horrorscope. For one thing, it’s frustrating that the studio decided to change the film’s title from the much more fun Horrorscope to simply Tarot, a word that evokes too many different things to establish any kind of tone. Setting the right tone and holding to it is vital for horror films, more so than in any other genre. Tone creates atmosphere, and in the world of horror atmosphere covers all manner of sins.

Which brings us to the next frustrating aspect of Tarot: its lack of any tangible atmosphere or tonal consistency. It doesn’t even commit to a particular emotional arc for any member of its ensemble cast. Even the most mediocre of horror films can be elevated by the simple feeling that the minds behind it know what kind of film they’re making and are leaning into that vibe. With this film, a creature feature that’s too light on the creatures and too heavy on exposition, you get the sense that the whole movie is mimicking the decision to change the title. It’s trying to be everything at once, and ends up feeling flimsy, empty, and again, very, very frustrating.

The title refers to a deck of very old, handpainted tarot cards that a group of friends find while they’re exploring the spooky old mansion they rented for the weekend. Right away, college student Haley (Harriet Slater), who knows her astrology and her tarot decks, decides she’s going to use the cards to tell the fortunes of her friend group as a kind of gift for her friend Elise’s (Larsen Thompson) birthday, the reason they’re all at the mansion to begin with.

The friend group, from resident stoner comic relief Paxton (Jacob Batalon) to Haley’s recent ex-boyfriend Grant (Adain Bradley), naturally has mixed reactions to having their fortunes told through a stack of very creepy cards. But Haley’s committed and, the movie shows us, talented at this sort of thing. She gives everyone a thorough fortune telling, the night ends, and that seems to be the end of it.

Except, of course, it’s not. Soon Haley’s friends are being picked off one by one, attacked in the dark by creatures that seem to have leapt right out of the tarot deck and into the real world. Turns out this particular tarot deck was cursed, and if Haley and what’s left of her friend group hope to survive, they have to find a way to break that curse.

It’s a pretty straightforward little horror movie roadmap for these characters, and the fun of Tarot, in theory at least, is watching each of the friends face down their particular tarot-deck monster because, as Haley’s remarks more than once, you can’t fight fate. This message, and the way the death scenes match up with the fortunes almost exactly as Haley told them, calls to mind another brutal movie about young people in the throes of fate: Final Destination. So, this should be fun, right?

Well, should be is the operative phrase, because for all the promise of its concept, Tarot soon squanders whatever tension it might have been able to create with the premise. Save for a single, blessedly more elaborate setpiece near the end of the film, the monster attacks all play like variations on the same horror theme. A character is alone, the lights start to flicker and dim, a creature appears in silhouette somewhere far away, and then disappears, only to— surprise!—reappear right next to the character with a nice loud sound that may as well just be a guy yelling “jump scare!” in your ear. The creatures all seem to behave the same way, make the same clutch of sounds, and (again, with a couple of exceptions) kill with predictable tameness. The good news is that they at least look extremely cool, thanks to designer and internet monster maker extraordinaire Trevor Henderson. Most of the time you can barely see them enough to realize that, however, because, like so many films of all genres these days, Tarot plays like a movie that couldn’t afford enough light bulbs.

But before you go asking, “Why would a movie so dependent on creatures spend so little time highlighting those creatures?” know that there are many other questions prompted by Tarot’s often baffling storytelling. Why does Haley spend so much time talking about the power of fate only to forget what she said when the story finds it convenient? Why does no one think to try and hit one of these monsters until 80 minutes into a 90-minute movie? Who on Earth is renting the house with the haunted tarot deck (which we learn has a reputation) to a bunch of kids? And why, once the film has introduced this splendid house full of creepy esoterica, does the movie decide to retreat to a nondescript college campus for a huge chunk of the rest of the movie?

This is really just a sampling of Tarot’s strange, frustrating, sigh-inducing decisions—decisions made more baffling and irritating by the bright spots that still linger in this film. There are the monsters, of course, and some flashes of truly solid production design. There’s Irish actor Olwen Fouéré showing up to steal the movie out from under the younger actors for a bit. There’s Batalon doing his best to inject a sense of fun into the material.

Sadly, none of this can really save Tarot, because the real problem with the film is more than structural, more than visual, and more than a screenplay that’s rote at best and groan-inducing at worst. Horror movies have somehow managed to ring entertainment value out of those elements and worse, so why does this film frustrate so deeply? Because Tarot is a movie that wants to do a horror paint-by-numbers without any bold colors, wants to play by horror rules without ever really stopping to even try and bend them, let alone break them. It’s a horror movie in search of something, anything beyond its core idea. And it’s never able to find it, no matter how many times it shuffles those cards.