A pack of students finds a spooky deck of Tarot cards in the spooky basement of a spooky mansion, and soon their deadly premonitions come to life.

Based on the novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams, the film’s understanding of Tarot is flimsy to say the least. Rather than leaving the cards open to interpretation (which is why anyone believes in divination), everything in the readings is taken literally. The Fool card comes to mean a literal jester will appear in your apartment building. Even the precise wording used in the readings (eg. “Don’t get hung up on it”) appears in the kills, although why these modern phrases would be part of an 18th-century curse is the only element not spelled out in excruciating detail.

The movie is constantly bogged down in exposition dumps, dour domestics and cringey dialogue (“Fuck fate!”), with one character (Olwen Fouéré) so blatantly there for the sole purpose of exposition that she begins literally every sentence by saying, “Hungary, 1789” or “London, 1988.” This laziness dooms the film to be forgotten, while the absence of any gore, tension, side characters or real-world elements robs the horrorscopes of both horror and scope.

That said, Tarot does just enough to pass as a movie to have on in the background at a slumber party, which is more than can be said for the likes of Ouija or Countdown. The characters might put the div in divination but they are likeable enough, compared to the obnoxious brats usually lost in the slasher movie shuffle.

But the lack of imagination means Tarot plays out like Final Destination without the elaborate kills, which are of course the only reason to watch Final Destination. If I just want to watch people yell their horoscopes at each other I’ll watch reality TV.