Aside from big blockbusters, horror makes for fantastic viewing in the cinema. The tension when you’re able to be locked into a good horror with a fantastic screen and sound around you, with an audience also along for the journey.

Tarot follows a group of young adults that go away for a weekend to a house in the country side, and when they explore, they come across some Tarot cards. It happens that one of the group, Haley (Harriet Slater), can read them and proceeds to do readings for the whole group. After that, the group is being killed one by one, but can they prevent the curse before it kills them all?

Directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg have very limited directing experience; Cohen has a couple more credits to his name having worked with Halberg on a podcast series, Tarot being Halberg’s first film. Cohen’s credits primarily come from his writing background, with his most notable projects being Moonfall and The Expendables 4, which are honestly two of the poorest written films I’ve seen in the last few years. I’d say Tarot is a better film from a dialogue point of view, at least, but the general story is very generic, but that could be down to it being based on a book by Nicholas Adams. The directing isn’t particularly strong and is definitely a downmark against the film. The film very much could’ve played like a Final Destination, where it has you on the edge of your seat, not knowing where this impending death is going to come from, but ends up being closer to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (not a bad film), where it isn’t particularly scary at all and feels like a light horror (perhaps explaining why it even managed to get a PG-13 rating in America).

The cast is a good mix of up-and-coming actors. Harriet Slater’s biggest roles were on the smaller screen in Pennyworth and Belgravia: The Next Chapter, as well as in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but I couldn’t tell you where she was in the film. Her former love interest in Tarot is played by Adain Bradley, who hasn’t particularly had a big role before. Then we get into the bigger guns. Jacob Batalon has appeared in a couple of the highest-grossing films of all time, having appeared as Peter Parker’s friend, Ned Leeds, alongside Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avantika is definitely a star on the rise, particularly having appeared as Karen in Mean Girls earlier this year. Humberly Gonzalez is perhaps the biggest one to watch; she might be 32 but is breaking out having recently been cast in Star Trek: Section 31, doing voice work in video games such as Far Cry 6, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and Kay Vess in Star Wars: Outlaws. Wolfgang Novogratz was one of the names being floated around as potential Superman casting before David Corenswet was cast in the role; his biggest roles to date were in Sierra Burgess is a Loser and Yes, God, Yes. Finally, to close out the group, Larsen Thompson has not been in anything of any particular note. They all do an okay enough job; you can slightly tell who the better actors with more experience amongst them are and wish we had more screen time with them than the others.

 

Overall, Tarot is a horror that will turn a profit because of how cheap it was to make and secured an easy paycheck for some good up-and-coming actors, but it lacks the fundamental part of a horror film, the scare factor; in fact, it’s funnier than it is scary. I won’t rush to see anything the director duo do again, but the experience of seeing horrors in cinema and some okay enough acting gets this film the score it has. A solid horror to start 11–12 year olds who want to get into the genre.

★★

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