'Tarot' Review: A Surprisingly Scary But Ultimately Forgettable PG-13 Horror (2024)

We live in a world where your star sign is considered a stronger indication of who you are than say… your actual interests. Standing tall beside other personal details like what you do, your age, and your height is your horoscope on most dating apps. Want to find out if your crush and you are a perfect match? Don’t bother going for a drink and getting to know them, put both your birthdays and birth times into a zodiac compatibility chart! Even though the ideology of the zodiac dates back to around 400 BC, modern culture has made way for our birthdays to define our personality traits, how we approach love and relationships, and how much we cry.

This obsession with the stars and how they affect us from the second we’re born is a perfect stage for a horror movie. Our fascination with forces beyond our control, and the fact that not everyone buys into them, makes way for a compelling story of fate, destiny, and whether we can change it. Enter Tarot, which was unfortunately renamed from its original title, the much more inventive and clever Horrorscope. Similar to 2015’s Ouija, it surrounds a group of friends, (Ouija followed naive teenagers, here we have older college kids) who play with dark magic and get more than they bargained for.

What Is 'Tarot' About?

Tarot follows the friend group led by final girl Haley (Harriet Slater) who is going through a recent and painful breakup with Grant (Adain Bradley), as their communication styles (he’s a Leo, she’s an Aquarius) have led to a breakdown in their relationship. Then we have the comedic sidekick Paxton (Spider-Man’s Jacob Batalon), madly in love couple Elisa and Page (Larsen Thompson and Mean Girls’Avantika), and friends who won’t admit they’re into each other, Madelyn and Lucas (Humberly González and Wolfgang Novogratz). The friends are staying in an AirBnB straight out of a Mike Flanagan Netflix joint and stumble across a wooden box with the zodiac wheel on it.

Inside is a deck of old, hand-painted tarot cards.

While astrology enthusiast Haley is reluctant to play with a deck that does not belong to her as this is seemingly an unwritten rule when it comes to tarot cards, her friends (mainly Elise) pressure her into doing all of their readings. They all seem pretty content with what Haley predicts and they each get a card with a terrifying figure on it — the fool (Paxton), the magician (Page), the devil (Grant), Death (Haley), etc. — but they all go back to college unphased. Then the classic horror trope of “the group gets killed off one by one” — but with a twist. Their deaths connect to their tarot reading and the figure stalking them is the same as the one that appeared on their card. The surviving members must then figure out how to stop the curse of the cards before they all succumb to their… horrorscope!

'Tarot' Is One of the Scariest PG-13 Horror Movies of the Past Few Years

Every month or so we’ll get a horror release that almost always follows a similar formula: a decent budget (by horror standards), backed by a big studio, and a PG-13 rating. And almost always these fail to scare, relying on empty jump scares, obnoxious CGI, and no blood or gore. Tarot feels quite formulaic in its setup — one-dimensional characters who are defined by one trait with the final girl who has to overcome her grief and trauma, and a curse that picks them off one by one. And yes, the dialogue is pretty stilted, rather shameless in its expositional approach, and doesn't really care that the characters sometimes sound like Siri rather than actual 21-year-olds. However, those thoughts are soon dashed when the first kill scene happens.

It’s unexpectedly brutal, with lots of shadowplay, a dark figure rushing at the camera, and a brutal, elongated death. There isn't much gore or blood (in this scene and throughout the film) but it still feels violent and relentless. Seeing such visceral violence and actually creepy attacks have become few and far between in PG-13 horror. Last year’s The Boogeyman didn't go past a few jumps and many of Blumhouse’s recent frights are as scary as a dark Spongebob Squarepants episode. Tarot strikes a solid balance between using audience expectations to scare themselves while still delivering actual horrific imagery.

Some of the monster designs are pretty straightforward, but there is one that could easily leave you with nightmares. Clowns have become a dubious creature to use in horror as two maniacs have taken up all the space on the podium — Pennywise from the It movies and Terrifier’s Art the Clown. But Tarot deserves props for its use of a funnyman in a truly terrifying way. It comes when it's Paxton’s turn to face down his demon, and his card shows “The Fool.” As he walks home alone at night, he hears a laugh not quite as bone-chilling as Heath Ledger’s but one that may play in your head as soon as you turn off the lights.

The sequence then descends into full-blown terror and I found myself watching the screen through my fingers as the clown steps out of the shadows and into full view. Insidious’s influence is very much felt throughout the film with tall, ghostly figures in Victorian-era clothing with dark eyes rushing at the screen — and a few decent jump scares. While Tarot is by no means at the standard of James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s modern masterpiece, this stylistic flourish of making its monsters meaner and more humane ensures Tarot stand out from the sea of movies that don't bother to attempt to have their creatures go beyond their CGI design.

'Tarot's Pitfalls Are Its Characters and Script

Tarot’s major downfalls come in its characters and the script. While slashers and most horror movies concerning teenagers and young adults aren't known for their dynamic characters, the best ones are. It matters if Sidney Prescott survives, you want to see best friend Randy make it out alive so he can reel off another set of rules for surviving a horror movie. While Ouija quickly disappeared from horror lovers’ minds, Olivia Cooke's lead performance as Laine added a large dose of urgency, making the fairly uninspiring plot feel somewhat tense.

Because horoscopes are used to define one’s personality, they could have been an effective tool to build fully realized characters, each complex and different from the last one. While the reading scene at the start makes some effort — Page is a control freak, Lucas is sensitive, and Grant runs away from those he loves — no more care is taken to make you want to root for these characters. They all, including lead Haley, exit the film with very little growth. Haley and Grant's rocky relationship is the first dramatic event we're told about and remains at the heart of the group, but the film offers barely any detail as to why they broke up — so why should we care if they get back together? Because the kills are so connected to the characters' horoscopes and themselves, a little more effort to shape these young adults into something more than demon bait would've put the film in a much better position. While it still manages to scare, inflicting fairly brutal scenes of violence on characters we have come to care about and understand would've made Tarot go from scary to downright horrifying.

You’d think a film surrounding horoscopes in 2024 would have a ton of clever quips and jokes about Gen Z and millennials' obsession with star signs — but it doesn’t. Hell, 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies had a star sign joke funnier than anything muttered in Tarot (Rachel Sennott’s conviction as she shouted “Well, he's a Libra Moon so that says a lot is still one of the actor’s best moments). Other than a few “ugh, you’re such a Leo” comments or the boys not buying into this astrology bullsh*t, Tarot doesn't have a whole lot to say about astrology and people’s relationship with it. Tarot could’ve easily been made 15 years ago in how little it connects to real life and, apart from a few mentions of grief and loss, it doesn't have a lot of emotional heft.

Olwen Fouéré's Performance in 'Tarot' Stands Out From the Rest

Slater’s Haley works merely as a vessel through which exposition can be executed. She’s constantly having realizations and then spouting textbook tarot knowledge so the characters can move on to the next action piece. This wouldn’t be so noticeable if we had supporting characters that came to life, but unfortunately, Mean Girls standout Avantika isn’t given enough to do (she really should have been the comedic relief) and Batalon makes Paxton into a caricature out of Scary Movie.

A performance that does its job and then some comes from Olwen Fouéré who plays the classic “expert who has experienced the curse before and may know how to stop it” character, Ms. Astryn. Before her entrance, the film struggles with its tone, cutting from conversations about their friends’ brutal deaths to Batalon’s Paxton defending his predictable password. When they finally track down Astryn, Fouéré injects the film with some much-needed tension and urgency, widening the scope of the film with dark lore that dates back centuries. The film has far too many expositional scenes but this one is both essential and executed perfectly due to Fouéré’s understated and foreboding performance. The Irish actor can also be seen in Ishana Night Shyamalan's directorial debut, The Watchers.

Tarot is a pretty forgettable horror movie. Dull characters, a basic plot, and very little to say with its themes render it a fairly unmemorable experience. However, what it can and should be commended for is showing how to scare within the constraints of the PG-13 rating. Some of its sequences are among the most frightening scenes in a PG-13 horror movie of recent years (we're not at The Ring's level but we are definitely higher than Five Nights at Freddy's). This alone is enough to warrant a recommendation.

Tarot (2024)

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Tarot makes a considerable effort to scare within its PG-13 rating but fails in its one-dimensional characters and basic script.

Pros

• The kill scenes are brutal and frightening for a PG-13 horror movie.
• Olwen Fouéré gives a brilliantly understated performance as a woman trying to track down the cursed deck of cards.

Cons

• The main characters feel lifeless and are not given enough growth for the audience to care about them.
• The script doesn't make use of the prominence of horoscopes in today's world to make jokes or observations.

Tarot is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

WATCH ON NETFLIX