Tarot has a good, but cliché, central idea, but it resorts to easy jump scares and stock characters rather than exploring any of its interesting themes. Directed by Spencer Cohen and Anna Halberg, the film stars Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, and Jacob Batalon. They are among a group of friends who finds a deck of tarot cards in the basement of a rented vacation house. The set-up is unironically out of The Cabin in the Woods (2011), and each friend gets murdered by the characters in the tarot cards as the film progresses.

Tarot’s production budget was reportedly a cool $8 million, cheap by movie standards, and after its $6.5 million dollars opening, the film will likely be profitable in the theatrical market. This is a business model that has worked since the days of Roger Corman, and until audiences start demanding better films, horrors like Tarot will continue to pop an easy profit.

The bad elements of Tarot are obvious. The scares are all of the jump variety, and the scary masks that the evil embodiments of the tarot cards wear look like they were made at a kindergarten craft day. The performances are passable, and the plot construction is overly convenient. At 92 minutes, Tarot breezes by and fails to leave an impression.

But there is a good central idea that the film leaves unexplored. Never mind that contemplating one’s finitude and fate is good fodder for horror; the conceit that the tarot cards tell these characters their flaws and give them ways to escape their fates could set up deeper questions that the film could explore. If you know that you always run away from your problems and you also know that the act of running away will kill you, would you be able to resist running away? Such an exploration of character and fate and behavior could work well in a movie like this, but the film’s resolutions fail to follow through on any of these ideas. Characters who escape their fate do so not because they alter their behavior or personalities, but because of contrived plot machinations.

Inexpensive horrors are different than cheap horrors, and sadly, Tarot is cheap horror. It has a decent set-up and some potentially interesting ideas, but it cannot live up to its potential.

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