Tarot
PG-13 horror flick more "Tarot"-ible than tolerable.
Film Yap is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The PG-13 horror flick “Tarot” (now in theaters) starts strongly enough before devolving into the doldrums.
College friends Paige (Avantika), Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Haley (Harriet Slater), Madeline (Humberly González), Elise (Larsen Thompson), Grant (Adain Bradley) and Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz) have gathered at a rented Upstate New York mansion to celebrate Elise’s birthday.
When they run out of booze the bored septet breaks into a basement marked as off limits. It’s here that they find a bunch of paranormal paraphernalia including a hand-painted deck of Tarot cards housed in a wooden box. At Elise’s insistence Haley reluctantly does readings for the gang despite it being considered bad luck to use another medium’s deck.
Upon returning to school in the city unfortunate circumstances up to and including death begin befalling the group. The surviving members of the septet decide to consult with a more experienced medium (Irish actress Olwen Fouéré) who herself survived the curse of The Countess (Stasa Nikolic).
As written, executive produced and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg – they had a hand in bringing “Expend4bles” to theaters last fall – “Tarot” is an adaptation of Nicholas Adams’ novel “Horrorscope” (a much better title!). Cohen and Halberg do something I often enjoy by employing a delayed title card … we’re talking 20 minutes into this 92-minute movie. Most of these 20 minutes consist of the Tarot readings and this is the flick’s funnest segment.
The cast is almost uniformly attractive, but their characters as written are as thin as the actors playing them. Most of what we learn about them is revealed during the Tarot readings … this one’s a rulebreaker, that one’s bullheaded, she’s creative, etc. We get mixed race couples, same-sex couples, mixed race same-sex couples and Ned from the recent “Spider-Man” movies. These folks cynically read more like bullet points on a diversity/inclusion checklist and less as fully fleshed out characters. I’m all for seeing characters who differ from me (lord knows we’ve seen enough stories about cisgender straight white men), but there should be characterization beyond someone’s race and/or sexuality.
The kills are OK and somewhat graphic for a PG-13 horror offering, but they grow repetitive over time. (Foley artists make funky, off-screen sounds, fake blood splatters onto a surface, wash, rinse, repeat.) A lot of the deaths and the filler surrounding them are often filmed too darkly by cinematographer Elie Smolkin, a DP who has mostly worked in TV save for the horror-comedy “The Final Girls,” which also read as inky.
“Tarot” was made for teenagers, but the ones in my screening left halfway through the flick and made a whole helluva lot of noise on their way out. My prognostication is “Tarot” is a movie without an audience that’ll fade from popular consciousness in no time.