Main cast: Harriet Slater (Haley), Adain Bradley (Grant), Avantika (Paige), Wolfgang Novogratz (Lucas), Humberly González (Madeline), Larsen Thompson (Elise), Olwen Fouéré (Alma), and Jacob Batalon (Paxton)
Directors: Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg
Talk about a generic-seeming premise: some friends rent a big spooky house in some rustic area for Elise’s birthday, which is livened by the fact that Haley has just broken up with Grant and therefore these two make a supposedly joyous party for Elise all about them.
This is why, people, you don’t invite people with relationship drama to your parties. They suck all oxygen in the room and make everyone as miserable as them.
Anyway, they discover a sinister-looking deck of tarot cards in the basement. Clearly nobody among these people has taken Evil Dead to heart, because Haley decides to use them to read everyone’s fortune before quarreling with Grant and get the whole party truly started.
Soon, the friends begin to die one by one, killed by the manifestations of the images of the card drawn for them, and sadly, no one gets crushed by a tower that falls from the sky onto them. That will be hilarious, but no, I get instead the more predictable appearances of the Fool, the Hermit, et cetera.
Notice that Haley basically ruins everyone’s fun and kills them too. Sadly, she and her useless boyfriend or whatever have the only flimsy excuse of a back story so yes, these two are definitely going to last a long time in this movie. Also, Jacob Batalon is arguably the biggest name among the cast members, so he gets plot armor even when it makes no sense for him to have it.
Worst of all, in the end, Haley stops the whole nonsense by finally letting go of her pain or some nonsense of that sort. This keeps her and her boo alive, and she conveniently comes to this approach after so many of her friends are dead.
Am I supposed to cheer this killer of her friends on because she finally finds a convenient and super lame plot device out of her ass to save herself and the waste of flesh that is her boyfriend? I’m sure their dead friends are so happy for them.
Seriously, people, do not invite people like Haley and Grant to your parties. They bring death to all that is fun, literally in this case.
Tarot is based on some young adult horror story, which probably explains the tonal whiplash here as it clumsily lurches from mild horror for normies to comedy and back again in ways that don’t really feel cohesive.
Jacob Batalon breaks any hint of tension or fear because his character is apparently incapable of saying anything that isn’t a quip, and the movie celebrates the end of the movie and the deaths of all those people that Haley has killed with her tarot act with a lame-ass comedic skit starring this fat clown.
Maybe the people behind this one are trying to attract a crowd that can’t get enough of MCU-style “Ha, ha, a tragedy has occurred, so let us all compete to come up with the worst immersion-breaking one-liner about it!” comedy, but judging from the box office of those movies, it’s likely that this is a bad bet.
Anyway, this movie is a bipolar formulaic mess that could have swapped out tarot cards for evil dolls or Polaroids or Ouija boards or whatever and the end result is still a by-the-numbers flick that just won’t die because such movies are cheaply made and hence easily break a profit as a result.
If anyone for some reason needs to watch this generic and absolutely forgettable thing—huge Jacob Batalon fans, perhaps—I’d suggest just doing it on streaming when one has already paid for the monthly subscription fee. It’s not worth any additional money one has to fork out for it.
