Each story begins with a predicament faced by a new main character, who, within a few minutes, invariably stumbles upon a tarot card – a different one each episode – after which it doesn’t take long for things to start going downhill for them.
Is their fate the result of bad luck or is there something else at play? For most of the characters there is more to their fate than meets the eye, with each half-hour episode packing in several little surprises.
Cho plays Ji-woo, a single mother who puts on a brave face as she struggles to support her daughter while looking for a job.
Fortunately, she lands a position as a cashier just before the Christmas holidays, but her luck runs out when her supervisor tells her first shift will be on Christmas Day.
Unable to find anyone to take care of her daughter while she works, Ji-woo leaves her at home alone.
Ji-woo’s fretting, which gets on her supervisor’s nerves, turns into terror when she begins to suspect that the imaginary friend her daughter is playing with back home may not be imaginary at all.
There is not much binding the episodes together. Apart from the fact they take place in some of the same locations – episode 3 begins where episode 2 left off, for example – the stories are unrelated, the tarot cards proving to be little more than a gimmick.
The series opts not to explore the mythology behind the cards or do much of anything besides introduce them at the start of each episode, before showing them again at the end to highlight the irony of their illustrations – the stories tend to wrap up with morbid twists related to each card’s imagery.
Tarot is also a mixed bag in terms of horror. There is not much tension in the first few episodes, in part because of a lack of time to develop the characters but also because the series sacrifices opportunities to craft scary elements early on in favour of narrative twists that are dropped at the eleventh hour.
The horror is merely tacked on to the end of formulaic scenarios, and this lack of originality marks much of Tarot as a disappointment.
The most memorable of the twists is as much eye-opening as it is scary; in episode three, a delivery man steps into a woman’s flat to discover a particularly gruesome and macabre scene.
Tarot debuted this spring at the Cannes International Series Festival as the first Korean series to participate in the event’s short-form competition.
In June, a theatrical version of the series, comprising the first three episodes, was released in South Korean cinemas ahead of the series’ July debut on streaming service U+ Mobile TV, which is quickly gaining traction as one of Korea’s hubs for the streaming of original drama series.
Tarot is streaming on Viu.