‘Tarot’ Capsule Review: An Empty Horror Entry Void Of Scares
From Screen Gems
Capsule Reviews feature a collection of thoughts from Sean Phillips (Math Teacher Movies) on films from recent days, as well as the past year, decade, and beyond.
From Sean Phillips
Tarot has a set up that could work wonders for horror if each character had their own parable type of murder, but they instead all worked within this superficial messaging.
The actual movie just seems poorly made with everything from writing to the visual nature all feeling far too rushed and never fully realized.
The performances are not good, but they are given stale dialogue and cliched caricatures, so it is not entirely their fault or responsibility; they embrace the cliches.
Characters are supposed to make dumb decisions in horror movies as that is essential for the genre, but these characters are next-level idiotic in both their ideas and construction.
The film becomes fairly predictable until an interesting fake out in the end that would have been better served by a dark ending, but instead they went with a joke that took the sting out of the whole film.
There is a world where this movie could be considered simply dumb horror movie fun, but the dumb overpowers the fun and all of the film just feels empty.
Tarot gives the PG-13 horror movie a bad name because while this is not scary (and not because it hits the brakes on the gore), the moments of suspense have zero payoff.
The film was flat out not scary at all with jump scares that had no weight and poor manipulations that never ended up working; they instead came off as entirely boring.
Rating: 1/5
Tarot is currently streaming on Netflix.
