Don’t break the rules.  If you do, there will be consequences.  Horrific consequences.  This simple premise is often used by horror movies because it’s so easy to grasp.  Bad judgment is quickly rewarded with a gruesome outcome.  It also builds anticipation in the audience from the get-go.  Those horny kids who engage in premarital sex?  A maniac will kill them for their immoral behavior.  You played with a Ouija board?  Sorry, it wasn’t just a game and an actual demon has plans for you now.  You cheated death?  Death isn’t happy and will be working overtime to correct things.  You played truth or dare with a stranger?  Tough break because playing games with strangers is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Tarot, a movie about the namesake deck of cards used to tell fortunes, follows this formula to the letter.  A group of college friends rent a home in the Catskills for the weekend.  Their mission?  To let loose.  They’re an easygoing group and are content to drink beer and laugh around a campfire.  However, there’s tension in the air because Haley (Harriet Slater) and Grant (Adain Bradley) broke up just before they all left for this weekend getaway.  Let’s start tallying up the broken rules by this bunch.  Rule #1: never attend a party with your ex.

Everyone’s bummed at the news, but they stick to partying.  Unfortunately, the booze runs out and it’s too late to drive out and get more or have a service deliver some.  (I thought DoorDash delivers everything, everywhere 24-7?)  So they rummage through the house looking for anything to drink but their search comes up empty.  That’s when they unwisely decide to break into the one part of the house with a DO NOT ENTER sign on the door.  Uh oh.  Rule #2: honor signs that tell you not to do something.

The door leads to a basement filled with occult objects.  One of the group finds a box filled with creepy tarot cards.  It just so happens that Haley is savvy with astrology and doing tarot readings.  In an attempt to distract everyone from her and Grant’s breakup, she offers to do a reading for everyone.  But wait, there’s that unspoken rule about not doing readings with someone else’s deck.  The group protests because it’s Elise’s (Larsen Thompson) birthday and fortune telling is so much fun!  Haley shrugs off her concerns and proceeds with her reading.  Rule #3: never play around with another person’s tarot deck.

Haley is very good at telling fortunes.  She uses what she knows of her friends to give very personalized readings.  The key to each fortune is the center card, which predicts the person’s future.  The cards, as I mentioned, are particularly creepy, and Elise’s center card is of the High Priestess.  Others get similarly creepy center cards, and when Haley reads her own fortune, it comes up as Death.  (Which either means the end of something or literal death.)  Everyone appreciates Haley’s performance except Grant, who uses his fortune to do some sniping at his ex.  They call it a night and head back the following morning, and that’s when the fun starts.

In movies like Tarot, each victim must be completely alone when evil comes calling.  And whatever it is, it skulks around in the shadows before it makes its move.  Elise, the birthday girl, hears the sound of laughter and a loud thumping noise outside her dorm room door.  When she investigates, she finds the ladder to the upstairs attic extended.  Of course there’s something running around in the attic that always evades her cell phone flashlight.  A jump scare knocks Elise to the floor below and the High Priestess takes Elise out of the story.

Shortly afterwards, nice guy Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz) meets his tarot avatar, The Hermit, and spectacularly catches the wrong train.  After these two quick deaths, the group is understandably concerned but the cops are of no help.  (To be fair, there isn’t anything in their training that involves haunted tarot cards.)  Haley frantically Googles and finds a discredited fortune teller named Alma Astryn.  (How does someone become discredited from a flim-flam profession like fortune telling, exactly?)  The group drives out to Alma’s cabin in the woods in search of answers, and she confirms that, yes, they are indeed cursed.  They played with the wrong deck and tells them the incredibly gothic backstory of the deck.  (It’s a doozy.)  Finally, she says that the only way to lift the curse is to DESTROY THE DECK.  Back to the Catskills?  Dude!

The cast is too big at this point so there are more deaths at the hands of the tarot deck monsters before the final showdown at the AirBnB in the Catskills.  For a movie that looked fairly pedestrian in the beginning, the filmmakers apparently saved as much of their micro budget as they could for the last third of the movie.  Then, when the movie appears to be over, it concludes with a genuine surprise.  Without spoiling things, all I’ll say is that one character I assumed had been killed was not, and the reason why was pretty funny.  (When you consider how this character escaped certain death, it makes perfect sense given the “logic” that these movies typically run with.)

I don’t like grading movies on a curve, but I have to make an exception for B-movies like Tarot.  It was made with an $8m budget and has a cast of unknowns with the exception of Jacob Batalon (Peter Parker’s high school buddy Ned in the last three Spider-Man movies.)  Some of the scary scenes are a bit murky, possibly to hide the lower-grade CGI.  Tarot is obviously a riff on the Final Destination movies, with each character going out of their way to be alone when they meet their fateful end.  The movie spends almost no time fleshing out the characters before proceeding with their deaths.  That being said, I still enjoyed the movie.

Unlike other horror movies where a bunch of young people you can’t wait to see die, I liked this bunch.  They’re handsome and agreeable and seem to like being around each other.  While each of them fits an easily recognizable horror movie archetype (the shy brainy one, the clown, the lovesick ex-boyfriend, the troubled ex-girlfriend, the fun-loving party girl), they aren’t annoying stick figures puffed up with attitude.  Aside from Batalon, Harriet Slater is perfectly cast as the final girl.  She’s the just the right combination of beautiful and haunted and I would expect to see her getting roles based on her performance in this movie.

Visually, Tarot starts out modestly but gets more interesting as it goes along.  There’s a scene where the history of the haunted tarot deck is shown, and it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Roger Corman Edgar Alan Poe B-movie from the Sixties.  Cinematographer Elie Smolkin brings a noticeable flourish to the proceedings, in particular a couple of scenes with expressionistic lighting straight out of Bran Stoker’s Dracula.  Another influence on display is Insidious, where one character is killed in a nightmare dreamscape by a monster who enjoys whistling.  Tarot isn’t original, but it does what it does with panache and proudly wears its influences on its sleeve.  It’s easy to feel superior to a movie like this, but it’s perfectly fine entertainment.  I liked the cast, I liked the use of the tarot as the basis for the “monsters” and I liked its style.  Mildly Recommended.

For more insight into Tarot‘s Insidious ties, check out this article on Bloody Disgusting.