Review: Tarot

Directors:  Anna Halberg, Spenser Cohen

Stars:  Avantika Vandanapu, Jacob Batalon, Harriet Slater

By the time the title card for Tarot is emblazoned across the screen – 10 to 12 minutes into the picture, at a guess – the rest of the movie has already been prognosticated for you. Literally. Beat for beat, writer/director duo Anna Halberg and Spenser Cohen have their young divination expert Haley (Harriet Slater) lay out the machinations of the movie to come. Each character’s death is foretold in their horoscopes, with plenty of tidbits feathered around the edges to make it all seem mystically fatalistic.

Not only that, but you can intuit exactly the kind of entry-level horror experience you’re about to be dealt. Halberg and Cohen tip their hand early. Creaky doors. Faces in the dark. Fake-out jump scares. We’re rooted firmly in the Blum wheelhouse (except this is a Sony/Screen Gems product – natch), adjacent to the playbook written by James Wan for the Conjuring universe. Before you can say “Ed and Lorraine Warren” there’s a bunch of college kids prying open the doors to someone’s Basement Collection of Cursed Junk. For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the popular horror franchises of the past decade, Tarot is going to give its game away in these opening minutes, right down to who’s likeliest to make it out alive.

Digging up clichés quicker than they can dig up the past, this bunch of Bostonian students speed-run the hoariest tropes of lazy horror. Googling the problem? Check. Visiting a reclusive old person who dolls out the requisite exposition? Check. Characters hysterically running off on their own to fulfil the prognosticated set-pieces? Check-check-check. In theory, Tarot is a weary old time at the flicks, fleeing from shadows we’ve long grown accustomed to.

It is that. It absolutely is that. And yet, also, it isn’t.

Because for every laugh-out-loud lame piece of exposition or trite “This is crazy!” exclamation, there’s an element that’s actually kinda neat, kinda warm, kinda inviting.

Let’s start with kinda neat. How about the way this picture absolutely guns it. 92 minutes that feels, frankly, a lot less than that, Tarot doesn’t fuck about. In the opening scene our YA friend group is already at their (final) destination, chatting up a storm around a campfire like this is the heyday of the ’80s slasher. Turns out it’s the aforementioned Haley’s birthday and so her moneyed friend Paige (Avantika Vandanapu) has organised a bash at a secluded mansion in the Catskills. Rooting around in the cellar brings out an inevitably-cursed tarot deck and, not long after, these Zoomers find themselves dying mysterious deaths as foretold that fateful night.

There’s not a moment of fat on this thing. It whips through everything from character development to exposition, burning toward whatever’s next. Granted, that works against the picture as often as for it. Many of the stalk-and-scare set pieces feel like cliff-noted compendiums, and most lack for innovation. But there’s no opportunity for the momentum to drop.

Kinda warm? Cinematographer Elie Smolkin lights this thing very handsomely, with the hearty glow of naked flames lending the picture a richness often eschewed by its contemporaries in favour of bland chills. Complimenting this visual warmth is the sense of unforced camaraderie between the leads. While the actors may have chemistry, this often turns out to be a group of Very Bad Friends. Once the threat is clear, one of their number is genuinely left to wander off to certain doom because saving them would prove a minor inconvenience to the rest, who have other plans! This aside, the hapless bunch are bound together not just by the curse of the tarot cards, but a shared stupidity that becomes strangely endearing. Watching them try to wriggle out of their predicament is like watching a kitten totter on its hind legs before an inevitable tumble. Nice try, buddy!

Kinda inviting? Well… yeah. It’s dumb as hammers. Predictable. Contains some truly risible back story (the name of our supernatural foe made me do an actual spit-take). But these ‘qualities’ are presented so guilelessly that Tarot becomes horror junkie’s comfort food. While it begs, borrows and steals from Ring, Final Destination, Ouija and Insidious (to name but a few), the recent cinema experience I’d most liken it to is… Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, because Tarot is just as jubilantly unpretentious. It sorta, kinda knows exactly what tier of naff multiplex fodder it is, and just plugs away at it with dogged gusto. Relatively tepid, totally bloodless, about as terrifying as a game of Uno. But also… pretty fun.

A movie can be worse things than disposable. Just recently a lot worse. The loftiest aspiration here is breezy entertainment and on its own terms Tarot is a success. But I would hope for greater ambition and ingenuity from Halberg and Cohen next time out. Time to graduate.