It’s Hard for ‘Tarot’ to Exist in a Post-‘Cabin in the Woods’ World

By Lindsay Traves | Film | May 7, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | May 7, 2024 |

Haunted party games and the consecutive deaths of teens in a friend group usually make for fertile ground for sleepover horror movies. It can sometimes be tough to distinguish between homage, formulaic turns, tropes, clichés, and outright copying, and Tarot falls somewhere on the negative side of a proper spectrum. Filled with tired cliché and lacking originality, this newest horror feature fades into its own dimly lit background.

Tarot is built around a group of archetypes, I mean, friends, who spend a weekend in a rented cabin in the woods. Having consumed their last bits of alcohol (though seeming quite sober for teens who’ve blown through so many glass bottles), the gang rummages through the creepy basement, unearthing a box of hand-painted tarot cards amongst other haunted antiquities. Despite the knowledgeable friend declaring that it’s bad luck to use someone else’s cards, they all ultimately relent and have their stars read, each regaled with spooky tales and being assigned a card and its monster. After they return home, one of their friends is killed in a manner similar to the prediction from the cards, so the group gathers to work to solve the mystery and protect themselves before each is killed by the cards’ haunted monster manifestations.

Yes, it has shades of Final Destination (mostly by virtue of blending supernatural with some structure of a slasher) which had me asking myself if my experience would have been different if this was a first time watch for me as a teen. Would I have better-enjoyed teens being picked off one by one after a supernatural experience had I come with no preconceived notions and no background in horror fandom? Probably not. Tarot, for all its low stakes and fun deaths, ultimately feels silly; it is mired by awkward dialogue, weird editing, and forgettable characters. That said, for those same reasons, it’s not entirely unwatchable and I wouldn’t scratch my head if a high schooler told me they loved it when they watched it in their friend’s basement, I’d probably contently smile. Tarot is a flat version of these sorts of flicks that isn’t likely to spark a mass following clamoring for sequels and reboots years later, but that doesn’t mean the people who consume it over a bag of chips and Skittles in a basement will regret the rental. (Are any of those THINGS anymore? Am I old? Should I add or remove the part about making prank calls on the landline before they watch?)

Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg wrote and directed the feature, using a book by Nicholas Adams. Their story clunks through the beats of its predecessors: teens playing with supernatural fire, getting picked off, finding an expert to help them, and a final faceoff. It should have been simple to forecast and play out, but it instead gets beaten up by attempts at subversion and oddly ordered scenes that undermine their own foreshadowing and have revelations come up out of order. Revelation scenes border on comedic but the movie is not self-aware enough for any of it to play as camp, meta, or funny. Though we’re back in a land of fun horror, it’s hard to go back to the old tropes, especially in a world where they’ve been parodied, subverted, and had meta-horror movies take them on. The party game was more successfully revisited in Talk to Me, for example, by twisting and changing the familiar narrative.

The strongest bits, despite viable dissent over them being too dimly lit, are the deaths and monster designs. Since each victim is haunted by a different card, there are multiple monsters that haunt the screen. While each obviously is of the same style, they have their own unique accessories and are spooky enough to be memorable. The demons’ powers are a bit unclear making for some of the kills being quite confusing, but it’s the only part that makes you want to suspend all disbelief in favor of enjoying a magic show with a haunted audience. The kill scenes add a spooky whimsy to an otherwise by-the-numbers affair.

Tarot is a relief by virtue of coming in warm at a time of a pivot in horror and feels like some nice spooky junk food. It’s cliché, it’s a bit of a bore, and the plot doesn’t hold up to even surface-level scrutiny, but for some fun monster designs and low-stakes deaths of vanilla characters, it’s something to watch.

Tarot hits theaters May 3, 2024