Tarot

Grade: C

My first tarot reading was online. It was super-informal. I caught her while she was live streaming and taking requests, so I commented “do one for me, please” and she did. The short version of the story is I had already known of her, and had written a song about her. She did this reading a couple of days before the single was coming out. I was very curious to see if she would say she knew about the song already, or maybe was getting some kind of strong vibe from me because of it. But no, the reading sounded fairly generic and routine. Entertaining, but nothing that blew my mind. She did tell me “there’s some sexual energy,” but I bet they say that to all the guys. The shoe is bound to fit someone.

The group of college students in the movie have names, but I struggled to keep track of them. Bodies Bodies Bodies, a horror comedy I admired, did such a great job of name-dropping everybody just enough that I knew all their names quite well by the end. In Tarot, they might as well be called sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, Narnia style. They have rented a mansion up in the Catskills for a night or two. They have run out of alcohol, but rather than go to the store or Instacart some over, they scour the house for booze, including breaking open a door that says “keep out.” In this forbidden room, they find an old wooden box with some tarot cards. Everyone gets a reading. There may not be any more alcohol, but they awaken some other spirits.

And we’re off to the races, into your standard Dead Teenager Movie. The least interesting characters are the first to “exit” – but really, most of them are pretty forgettable. With little to no emotional investment in any of them, I didn’t really care what happened to who. There isn’t much gore (I was not surprised to find out afterwards that this is PG-13), so the film has to rely on tone, mood, and jump scares. I enjoyed the cinematography in a few of the kills, particularly the one on the train, the Jester one, and the Magician one. The small cast is a tell that they likely couldn’t afford or didn’t want to use extras. This won’t last long in theaters, especially now that The Fall Guy has dropped, and the apes are coming.

Aside from some nice set pieces, I give Tarot credit for having a different body count than I would have predicted. I didn’t recognize any actors, but I enjoyed a couple of them. Jacob Batalon played Ned Leeds (do you know who that is? I don’t) in various Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and made it into Avengers: Endgame. Harriet Slater, whose small filmography does include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, shows a lot of promise as the lead scream queen here. She reminds me of Reese Witherspoon, Anna Faris, and Melissa Joan Hart rolled into one, and I look forward to seeing how her career progresses. Or maybe that’s just the sexual energy talking.

Grade: C