I have a friend who is witchy in that they love to imbibe tarot readings and other spiritual practices of the same ilk, and when I sent them the trailer for the new home media release from Sony Pictures, Tarot (2024), once learning that I would be reviewing it, I was treated to the very real frustration about how much the film, even just in the trailer, gets wrong about the practice of tarot readings. While I’m not someone who thinks that something should be entirely accurate, particularly in a horror film, to be successful (I’m a huge aviation geek and I don’t scoff at Snakes on a Plane (2006) because it’s ridiculous from an aviation perspective, that’s actually why I love it.), it sometimes can be the downfall of a film when there isn’t a winking eye to the camera. Tarot, despite being a relatively ridiculous premise for a horror film, even within the gimmicky studio “haunted item” horror that has become increasingly more prevalent over the years, plays itself completely seriously, rendering itself both unable to be taken seriously, but also unable to have fun with. So, what is the point?
Jacob Batalon in Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s TAROT. Photo courtesy of Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
A group of college friends, Haley (Harriet Slater), Grant (Adain Bradley), Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Paige (Avantika), Madeleine (Humberly González), Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz), and Elise (Larsen Thompson), are spending the weekend at a secluded Airbnb in the Poconos. When the group discovers a mysterious deck of tarot cards in the basement while searching for liquor, they prompt Haley, a believer and practitioner of tarot, to conduct their readings, despite her misgivings about the bad luck of using someone else’s deck of cards. As they all learn their fortunes from the cards, the friends end their weekend and go about their lives. When one of them dies in a freak accident not dissimilar to the fortune told to them by Haley’s reading, they soon realize they are being picked off one-by-one in manners described to them by the tarot cards. They all must band together to defeat the sinister force behind the cards before it takes them all.
Avantika in Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s TAROT. Photo courtesy of Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Listen, I love teen horror so much when it’s done right, but there is, unfortunately, a stigma behind teen horror (and PG-13 horror as a whole) that it’s all neutered horror with cheap tropes that only serve as a forgettable means to get 14-year-old Kelsey to scream and spill her popcorn all over her friend’s dad’s couch at a sleepover. In turn, often we can see teen horror films with actual quality behind them fall to the wayside due to audiences’ preconceived notions about the genre. Tarot is not one of those films; in fact, it’s exactly the film described above that is indicative of the worst that the genre has to offer. Genuinely unmemorable characters, cheap jumpscares in place of actual atmosphere, obvious censorship of bloody violence to achieve a PG-13 rating, and just an overall laziness to the entire ordeal that makes 92 minutes feel like an absolute eternity.
Larsen Thompson in Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s TAROT. Photo courtesy of Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
But perhaps the thing that makes me genuinely frustrated with Tarot isn’t the generally disposable nature of it all, but that it’s a much bigger theme in the scheme of throwaway studio horror like this: it has such little respect for its audience. It’s not even that the screenplay is lazy (it is, don’t worry), it’s that it actively talks down to its audience, assuming that teenagers watching the film are too fucking stupid to pick up on any sort of nuance or atmosphere that a horror film could provide outside of loud noises and cheap jumpscares. It assumes that any malevolent image is sure to scare anyone watching the film regardless of whether it’s used in a spot where it actually justifies itself being scary. It’s a cheaply constructed fairgrounds haunted house that shoves ghosts completely incongruous with the rest of the ride’s theming just so you don’t go more than 30 seconds without something that could potentially jolt you, and honestly, it’s rather insulting.
Humberly González in Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s TAROT. Photo courtesy of Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Sony’s Blu-ray release for Tarot isn’t quite as lazy as Warner Bros.’s recent Blu-ray release for Challengers, but it certainly doesn’t make any points for actually purchasing it unless you’re already an established fan of the film (which is valid!). While the film is sleekly shot on digital, there’s really nothing Sony could do to patch up the fact that the film is simply too dark to see most of the time. It’s not just Tarot, but so many other films of this era of film where lighting is thrown to the wayside to just “fix it in post,” and every time, scenes relying on the dark are almost always too dark to see anything, and scenes in the light are left with a completely dull, gray, flat look to it all, particularly when shooting on digital. Sony has always been at the forefront of the Blu-ray game when it comes to the quality of the A/V transfers, but sometimes even the best can only do so much.
Avantika in Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s TAROT. Photo courtesy of Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
I will give it credit for at least having a fun audio transfer though. With so many damn jumpscares and gimmicky horror throughout, there has at least been some thought put into filling out the entire soundscape with something worthwhile. While only a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track and not that of Dolby Atmos (which I never expected), it still fills the space with a great amount of body and atmospherics that use its five channels better than many Dolby Atmos releases use their nine channels. Even if the soundtrack sounds like a collection of stock music taken from Netflix reality show interstitials, the quality remains undeniable.
There are even some special features. Pretty shallow, baseline, completely disposable special features, but it’s a much better look than to completely eschew the release of any supplemental material at all. Special features are as follows:
- A Twist of Fate: Making the Film
- Circle of Friends
- Killer Outtakes
No one ever expected Tarot to be a shining example of horror excellence in 2024 à la Longlegs or whatnot, but sometimes I do expect a modicum of effort to be put into a film to even just getting it to be passable enough to justify the time I spent on watching the film. When a film blatantly wastes my time and money (which in this case, it didn’t, but the $48 million it made at the box office indicates it wasted a lot of people’s money) in the effort to recoup a few million dollars for its budget, as opposed to … y’know, funding and supporting up-and-coming voices that are unique and probably could deliver you a film with even less of a budget, I really just come to tune the entire thing out. It’s not even that Tarot is offensive, it’s just kind of … nothing. Sony’s Blu-ray does its best to put together something decent given the material, but can’t even do much with that beyond a particularly solid, but not game-changing, audio mix.
The cards say I’ll never even think of this film again after publishing this review.
Available on digital May 28th, 2024.
Available on Blu-ray and DVD July 9th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Sony Pictures Tarot website.
Final Score: 1 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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