dir. Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg
A college student discovers a deck of Tarot cards, and performs readings for her group of friends. Shortly afterwards, one by one, they start dying. Each death is quite explicitly related to the Tarot reading they received: someone who was shown The Hanged Man is hanged themselves, someone else shown The Magician is sawn in half. Thus, it is extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to be remotely frightened by anything which happens in Tarot. Everything is exactly as the cards predicted, so there are no surprises or scares. There is no inventiveness or even any gore to the deaths. Things are no more interesting among the living, where each character is utterly one-note and forgettable; the only exception is the comic relief character destined to die by the hand of The Fool, who is harder to forget purely by virtue of being so unbearably irritating. Possibly the only interesting thing about Tarot is the ending: the plot is wrapped up in a wholely unsatisfying way, and the end credits begin – only to reveal it was a fake-out and the real ending is still yet to come… but that real ending is only about fifteen more seconds, doubling down on what we’ve already seen and somehow making it even more underwhelming. Besides the bizarre execution of its banal ending, Tarot is utterly predictable down to the finest detail. No fortune telling or Tarot readings required to see what’s coming here.
BMDb 