Tarot is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Or a horror film for people who like to shout at the screen, possibly after a couple of drinks. Or that’s the initial impression at any rate.
It starts out in territory so familiar it feels like a large language model wrote it. A small language model even. A group of guys and gals staying at a big old house. The girls are hot; the guys have personalities. There is a room the visitors have been warned not to enter. And so they do. There they find a deck of tarot cards, distinctively designed, and one of the hot girls, who’s read a couple of books on tarot and horoscopes and so on, decides to cast the futures of everyone present.
Guess what – the predictions all start coming true, gruesomely. Destiny has spoken. But are the prophetic foretellings of the ancient deck set in stone? Or can anything be done to alter the future. “You can’t change fate,” says Haley (Harriet Slater), who did the readings, to friend Paige (Avantika) after death visits this once happy-go-lucky gang.
That’s the philosophical knot this film worries away at, superficially anyway. Because really this is an exercise in raising genre expectations and then either confirming or confounding them. Which is to say that Tarot starts off familiar enough but does some unexpected things as it treads its familiar path, wrongfooting here and there, trading in genre convention in other places.
So the clouds do scud across the moon, mysterious voices can be heard giggling behind doors. Lights fizz on and off. And so on. And there is a wise old loremeister who at a certain point will be consulted and will offer an explanation and a possible solution to Haley and co’s ongoing problem. This time out the role is taken by Olwen Fouéré, her shock of long white hair and strong Irish features suiting her to the role.
This is a sleek film, confidently directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, who bring a glossy sheen to everything, helped enormously by the careful, slick lighting of Elie Smolkin. The technicals, as Variety likes to say, are very good, though the music is obstructively high in the mix.
The deaths are good too. Neatly set up and executed and displaying a mastery of tension-building. There is splatter, and some of it is a bit on the gruesome side, but Cohen and Halberg aren’t overly relying on gore to get their effects. That said, death by knife, saw, speeding train, on the end of a rope – it’s here if you want it.
It is generally a good cast and they play their characters as less obnoxious versions of characters we’ve met before. Most of them you won’t know, in all likelihood. I recognised only Wolfgang Novogratz, very good in Yes, God, Yes, and Fouéré (fantastic in The Survivalist, the film that announced Mia Goth as a thing) but the rest… no tiny bell ringing, though it probably should be.
Pretty young actresses at drama school must surely do entire semesters on horror acting and Harriet Slater has clearly been to them all. She is the backbone of the film and pulls off the same trick the rest of the film is managing – she’s familiar and yet fresh and brings a girl-next-dooriness to the traditional role of the final girl, which is another little bit of finessing the film does. There are two final girls.
This film has not fared that well in reviewland but I think it’s been written off unfairly. It is full of cliché, but it isn’t blindly following the well-worn path: it’s rolling around in genre staples but also having a bit of fun with them. Amazingly, this is Cohen and Halberg’s first outing as directors. What will they come up with next?
Tarot – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
