A Group of Friends are dealt a bad hand

In Tarot, a group of young adults discover a weird deck of tarot cards and, to their eternal regret, decide to play with them. The group is renting an old mansion for a birthday celebration. They find the cards hidden in a basement.

Haley (Harriet Slater), the movie’s main character, is something of an authority on fortune telling and astrology. She is put in charge of reading her friends’ horoscopes. Each tarot card features a different figure: the high priestess, the hanged man, the magician, the fool, and the devil.

Of course, there’s also that pesky death card. The movie repeatedly explains that death can mean “the end of something or the beginning of something else”. That’s the funny thing about fortune telling, isn’t it? The fortunes are so vague that they can be interpreted to mean virtually anything.

Most of Haley’s friends are skeptical about the cards’ alleged power, especially her ex-boyfriend, Grant (Adain Bradley). Naturally, their skepticism wanes as they are targeted and dispatched one by one.

Each friend is attacked by a figure from the cards. The high priestess, jester, etc. are able to supernaturally manifest in the real world. The manner of each person’s demise equates to their horoscope readings. They are killed in the order that their fortunes were read. The survivors figure out the pattern and attempt to save themselves before the tarot monsters come for them. Eventually they locate an eccentric astrologer, Alma Astron (Olwen Fourere), and ask her for help.

Tarot  vs. Final Destination 

If this storyline seems familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen at least one of the movies in the Final Destination franchise. That series features “Death” as a villain. Death is portrayed as an invisible force. It target people who, through some unexplained cosmic fluke, survived calamities that were supposed to kill them.

Each Final Destination movie features characters that attempt to figure out the pattern that Death is following in order to change their destinies. Most of them also feature a mysterious undertaker who offers cryptic advice, similar to the elderly astrologer in Tarot.

Unlike Final Destination, Tarot features tangible on-screen villains. But that isn’t enough to distinguish it. If it wasn’t for the horoscope angle, this movie could almost be called Final Destination 6.

Related: The Final Destination Movies Ranked

An Average movie hampered by its lack of originality

Tarot is competently made, but lacks novelty. The film was co-directed and written by two first-time directors: Spenser Cohen and Anna Halburg. Directing a movie for the first time is a steep challenge, to be sure. But many first-time filmmakers have made a name for themselves by pursuing their unique visions.

In this case, the directors chose an easier but less rewarding path: borrowing material that worked for others in previous films. They missed the chance to distinguish themselves as filmmakers.

The script is bland. The characterization is minimal and the dialogue is generic. Like the figures on the cards, the characters are familiar archetypes: the believer, the skeptic, the old sage, the joker, etc.

A movie like Tarot mainly exists to entertain us with creative kills (another attribute it shares with Final Destination). Tarot‘s first kill is its best. A character is impaled by a pull-down attic staircase. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone knocked off that way before. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for other characters’ demises. In fact, one of the deaths appears to be directly lifted from a Final Destination movie.

Rating

Tarot doesn’t offer much that horror fans haven’t seen already. It’s occasionally entertaining, but ultimately it comes up a few cards short of a full deck.

Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 5 

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