A thoroughly abominable horror as nauseating as ‘Madame Web’ battles cartoon characters in its quest for Netflix relevance

There is no battlefield, nor theater, nor amalgamation of social parameters as cutthroat, lawless, and brutal as the Netflix Top 10. Here, the food chain changes every 12 minutes, the freshwater fish and the sharks are always in flux, and a five-dollar-budget rom-com can go toe-to-toe with the likes of Scorsese, Kubrick, and Nolan. It is the most breathtakingly dissonant spectacle around.

Subsequently, only in the Netflix Top 10 can the likes of Tarot — the dead-on-arrival supernatural horror flick and one of Sony’s many misfires of 2024 — find itself drawing swords with animated sleeper agents the denizens of Netflix might’ve very well deployed for this specific reason.

Per FlixPatrol, Tarot, the shoddy disaster that it is, is nestled in the number four spot on the United States Top 10 Netflix film rankings, where it’s currently surrounded by cartoon after cartoon after cartoon: Trolls Band Together, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Minions, and Netflix’s own Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie.

And frankly, this is the most poetic company Tarot could keep right now. With the arguable exception of Trolls Band Together, the horror film’s cynical self-loathing duking it out with a blend of sugary, immature brand of filmmaking represents two sides of a spectrum comprised of the medium’s worst possible impulses. It is well and truly one of the most profoundly stupid collaborative trainwrecks that the Netflix rankings could ever offer up, and we’re enabling it.

Lord, we might even prefer another Madame Web dynasty to this.