Tarot – REVIEW

Avantika in Tarot

We’re at the point in the year that I like to call “The Catch-Up,” at least for movies. Not everyone can watch every new release in a year, myself included. So, looking around streaming services and even looking at places like the local library are usually on schedule. For the end of December and most of January, The Catch-Up is in effect, and Tarot, which can be boiled down to a sauceless Final Destination, is the first of them. This is nearly every classic horror trope in one movie: a group of friends spend some time in the woods and do tarot readings together, and they break the rules of the readings, releasing curses that will kill each person based on the reading they received. The idea of cursed tarot cards certainly has potential, but to put it bluntly, the movie is just so bland. Believe it or not, there are some positives here. The monster designs are surprisingly inventive, and both Jacob Batalon and Avantika try their best to save a lifeless script. Both of those good things really are only good when I could actually see the movie, though. I know that the lighting is such an arbitrary thing to criticize, but it’s just abysmal in Tarot. Effective horror lighting can be dark and work incredibly well, but it feels like they literally turned down the brightness like you can do on a phone during post-production and didn’t do anything else. That being said, I can't wait for Nosferatu, which will hopefully do this well. I just want to talk about any other movie. Absolutely Tarot-ble (I’ll see myself out).


Ryan’s Grade: D