Review: ‘Tarot’ is what you end up watching when fate is entirely cruel to you

There comes a time in every film critic’s career when they have a social responsibility to drop the artistic, editorial aspects of the craft for the sake of making their verdict as crystal clear as possible. Those of us partial to referential jabs might even say that such a time is written in the stars; fated, if you will.

In saying that, heed this opening sentiment; I genuinely do not know how to explain to you all how bad of a film Tarot is. Whatever iota of potential this grotesquely cynical, parodically written, shoddily acted slab of 92 minutes manages to slap together — with half a paper clip and a few droplets of Elmer’s glue — is just as quickly snuffed out by what can only be described as anti-hubris of the most severe variety.

The film follows a septet of college friends — Haley, Grant, Paxton, Paige, Madeline, Lucas, and Elise — who all spend a weekend together at an Airbnb, where they find a box of Tarot cards that look suspiciously demonic. Against her better judgment, Haley reads the fortunes for herself and all her friends. But after they return home from their trip, they all start getting picked off one by one by murder-happy manifestations of the Tarot cards they each received.

Let’s get something straight; from the opening seconds of Tarot, no one should be under any illusion that this film is trying to be anything more than the equivalent of a direct-to-video slush feature one might find not even at the bottom of the bargain bin, but kicked underneath it with a yet-to-be-determined level of animosity. It is an insult of the highest order, then, to give a film like this a shot at the box office. It’s a piece of hack work for the sake of pocketing a few dollars, and that’s entirely disgusting.

It didn’t have to be, of course; killers themed around the Major and Minor Arcana found in a Tarot deck? That’s certainly more than enough of a springboard to come up with something viscerally interesting, if not cerebrally thoughtful. The whole of Tarot‘s final form, however, is entirely indicative of a creative process that began and ended with “what if these Tarot characters, who by design spell our fate, were demons looking to stack up their body count,” because everything surrounding the film’s central shtick seems to be of an even lesser effort than such a postulation.

For instance, before we’re even introduced to the film’s title, the friends begin the process of rotating in and out of the proverbial hot seat as Haley describes, in fine detail, what lies ahead for them according to the cards. We audiences, of course, cannot realistically be expected to remember such a rapid-fire rundown of all these fictional destinies, but that’s okay because we’re picking up what’s being put down; Haley is literally describing the rest of the movie to us.

Had Tarot not been lusting after its own destruction, that would have been the only time we heard these fates explained to us. It would hardly be an improvement, perhaps, but at least then there would be some rewatch potential in picking out how each of Haley’s individual words ultimately manifested; best case scenario, Tarot could have been a curious exercise in attention to detail. Instead, Tarot bombards us with audio-only flashbacks to each prediction when they come true, and even has its characters verbally repeat them as they’re witnessing/falling victim to/otherwise learning about them.

In other words, Tarot is textually reacting to itself the way it may have wanted audiences to, because… the events of the film’s script took place after one or more of the characters said that they would, in fact, occur. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sort of writing that blows right past vapid and entrenches itself within a depth of self-flagellation from which there may be no escape.

But it’s not even really accurate to say that, either because at the end of the day, Tarot simply does not care. It doesn’t bother about individual or interpersonal character work (arcs and characterization are non-existent, and even Jacob Batalon, the watchable goof-master that he is, can only occasionally give the impression that this wasn’t a total phone-in fest), it doesn’t want to understand that all the spooky lore and shoehorned backstories in the world can’t make up for a profoundly disrespectful approach to storytelling, and overall, it just generally doesn’t care that it exists as a movie whatsoever, perhaps much less the possibility that someone might watch it.

This is its absolute worst quality because even if you make a film so void of logical and emotional credibility that you’re so clearly not meant to take it seriously (Vin Diesel knows a thing or 10 about that at the time of writing, provided you don’t count Hobbs & Shaw), you can’t expect anyone to enjoy your film if the film itself very obviously doesn’t enjoy being what it is; Tarot loathes itself with every fiber of its being and shamefully telegraphs this right up until the mid-credits scene. It harbors, I presume, similar feelings for those who watch it.

All in all, Tarot is one of the single most repulsive studio films we’ll probably get all year, and perhaps over the course of the next couple of years as well. It takes no joy in any of its stupidity, and it regards any and all creative real estate with such lethargic, amateurish contempt, that you can’t help but head-canon that Tarot was the result of an in-house destiny method employed by Sony, where its story and tens of other scripts were all thrown into the air at once, and those that landed right-side down got discarded until there was only one screenplay left standing; that is well and truly the only possible explanation for how such a woeful implosion like Tarot ever made it to the top of the greenlight pile.

Indeed, had this been a film that made its first home on YouTube or Plex or any other medium that doesn’t expect professional artistry and creativity from everyone, Tarot might have been a perfectly harmless instance of hobbyist filmmaking that exists almost solely to keep the hands of its creators busy. But this is a full-blown Hollywood production that cost millions of dollars to make, and that people have to pay money to watch; for a film like this to occupy that space is wholly unacceptable in every way that matters.

And I still don’t feel like I’ve explained how bad Tarot is.