Rating: 2/5
What can I say? “Creepy tarot” sounded too up my alley to skip.
A group of college-aged friends Airbnb a mansion in the Catskills. It’s a birthday celebration for one of them. When the booze runs out, they break into a Keep Out room only to find a series of astrology-adjacent devices.
One of them finds a deck of tarot cards. The cards are hand-painted with creepy versions of the original card. The friend who does tarot knows it’s bad luck to use someone else’s deck, but the birthday girl insists, so the astrology friend does readings for all of them.
Within two days, two of them die in freak accidents. The only pattern the friends can see is that their deaths relate to their tarot readings.
Are their fates sealed, or can they find a way to change it?
I love the premise. The trailer wasn’t thrilling, but trailers rarely represent the movie accurately.
I didn’t realize until the first death that this is a PG-13 horror movie. So, while a ton of money went into the tarot creature CGI, the deaths are almost all off-screen, with maybe a splash of blood to indicate what is happening.
Which is fine! But the script is also pretty sloppy — how they get to the significant beats is almost exclusively someone googling something and then making a choice based on that.
Also, the characters are paper thin, but they try to have so many character beats. I didn’t care about anyone.
All of these things individually wouldn’t bother me so long as another aspect worked.
I got a couple of spooks — the special effects team did the hermit’s lantern well. The others look alright, but they’re all so CGI-heavy that it didn’t feel grounded.
I think the bones are there for a fun movie, but for whatever reason, the creativity that would make this work wasn’t there.