Tarot – As Bottom of the Barrel A Horror Film Could Get

Tarot follows a group of friends who rent out a mansion and unknowingly find a hidden basement with a cursed tarot card deck in it. When they recklessly violate the rules of Tarot readings – never use someone else’s deck – they unleash an unspeakable evil trapped within the cursed cards. One by one, they come face to face with fate and end up in a race against death to escape the future foretold in their readings. Tarot sort of came out of nowhere. Releasing one trailer awhile ago, the film barely saw much in the way of being marketed before being unceremoniously dumping in theaters alongside The Fall Guy on the first weekend of the summer movie season. These signs should’ve been a good indication of the quality of what audiences could expect from Tarot which unfortunately is one of the worst horror movies of the decade thus far.

It’s never fun trashing a film, especially one in the horror genre, but sometimes it’s impossible not to when films as bad as Tarot are released into theaters vying for audiences’ hard earned money. It is easily one of the most generic, derivative, lifeless, laziest, and worst horror releases of the year. There isn’t a single original bone in its body and virtually everything from the story to the scares and locations feel pulled from much better films with none of the impact. There are shades of Final Destination, Talk to Me, Truth or Dare, and pretty much every horror film that revolves around some sort of curse. Meanwhile, the film boasts some of the worst characters of the past several years and it’s honestly kind of laughable at how it doesn’t even attempt to develop them or do anything to make them stand out. Randomly catching up with the film’s group of characters in the middle of their trip, audiences are given quick lines of dialogue meant to highlight their defining traits. However, once they are spoken, they are almost immediately forgotten. Learning essentially nothing about these characters, it is next to impossible to care for them as much as the film clearly wants audiences to, and it doesn’t help that they constantly make the most idiotic decisions known to man just to keep the plot moving.

The writing and acting aren’t much better either. None of the actors embarrass themselves but their inexperience showed while even the more recognizable faces such as Avantika and Jacob Batalon don’t get much to do and fail to enliven anything. That being said, there were a couple of mildly suspenseful sequences but for the most part, this is the complete opposite of scary or intense. Even its jump scares are extremely predictable and cause more of a headache than a fright. Starting off bad in a fun sort of guiltily pleasure way, the film then turns into a complete bore that progressively gets worse with each passing minute, leading to a downright terrible and drawn out finale. The only mildly positive things to say about this one are that some of its creature designs are pretty cool and could’ve worked well in a better film. As familiar as everything in this is, the premise is admittedly decent and could’ve lent itself to a pretty decent horror film had it had more experienced filmmakers behind it.

In the end, it truly does suck being this down on a film but to be completely honest, Tarot feels like it was made by a TikToker and AI over the course of a single weekend. It is about as lazy, dull, and repetitive as mainstream studio horror gets. Audiences are better served to avoid this at all costs, this is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to horror films.

still courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Connor Carey

www.connorsmoviereviews.com/