Tarot—Three cursed cards turn ordinary Seoul nights into waking nightmares
Introduction
The first time I watched Tarot, I caught myself checking the front door twice, the way you do after a story gets under your skin and won’t let your mind turn the lights out. Have you ever rushed to work and wondered whether fate changes the second you close the door behind you? This anthology crawls into those seconds—between a mother and a child, between a passenger and a driver, between a courier and a stranger—and asks what a single card can do to a whole life. It’s not just jump scares; it’s the unease of city nights, the fluorescent hush of a convenience store, the lonely hum of a taxi meter, and the buzzing phone of a delivery rider glued to navigation. In a world where we obsess over a home security system, identity theft protection, and the hazards of gig work, Tarot aims its horror at the fears we already carry in our pockets. By the time the final card flips, you’re not asking whether you believe in curses—you’re asking what you would have done differently.
Overview
Title: Tarot (타로)
Year: 2024
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Anthology, Drama
Main Cast: Cho Yeo‑jeong, Dex (Kim Jin‑young), Ko Kyu‑pil, Park Ha‑sun, Seo Ji‑hoon, Lee Moon‑sik, Lee Joo‑bin, Hahm Eun‑jung, Jo Hyun‑jae
Runtime: 94 minutes
Streaming Platform: Not currently streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Viki, or Kocowa in the U.S. (checked November 19, 2025).
Director: Choi Byung‑gil (Ashbun)
Overall Story
Tarot opens with an image that feels like urban folklore made flesh: a battered deck of cards slipping from one pair of hands to another as Seoul exhales into night. No narrator explains the rules, but the film makes a pact with us—every story begins with a card, and every card exacts a price. Director Choi Byung‑gil stitches together three chapters, each self‑contained and yet linked by the whisper that fate is just one decision away. The tone is grounded, almost documentary in how it treats cramped apartments, corner stores, and the blue glow of phones, and that realism makes the supernatural hit harder. You feel like you’ve stood in these places, and that’s where the dread grows—because if it can happen there, why not here? Built from the 2024 TV series and edited into a theatrical feature, the movie uses those familiar spaces to reframe an old superstition for an age of notifications.
The first tale, “Santa’s Visit,” centers on Ji‑woo, a single mother heading to a Christmas Eve shift at a convenience store, the kind of sacrifice too many parents know by heart. She finds a Wheel of Fortune card and chalks it up to a gimmick, but the night starts fraying when her daughter’s video calls turn from chatter to panic. The store’s fluorescent quiet contrasts with the shudder in Ji‑woo’s voice, and each unanswered call feels like a floorboard creaking upstairs. Have you ever tried to work while your mind is already home, sprinting down hallways you can’t reach? The film traps her in that helpless space, where distance turns seconds into knives. When a shadow flickers behind her child on the screen, the story stops being about luck and becomes a race against guilt.
Ji‑woo bolts for home, and the movie widens from jump scares into something heavier: the ache of a parent who left because bills don’t pay themselves. The apartment’s darkness is ordinary—no thunderclaps, just the hum of an old heater and the scrape of a chair. Tarot knows that terror can be the unremarkable—the attic ladder that sticks, the toy left in the hall that wasn’t there this morning. The creature she confronts, a distorted echo of Santa, is less a monster than a mirror held to her fear that she chose work over watchfulness. Have you ever felt that, the fear that your child needed you in the exact minute you weren’t there? The rescue is frantic and raw, but what lingers is the knowledge that no home security system can guard against the consequence of a moment.
“Going Home,” the second tale, shifts to a businessman, Kyung‑rae, adrift after a fight with his mistress and sliding into a taxi past midnight. When he notices a Fool card tucked near the seat, he laughs it off, the way people do when they believe they’re still in charge of their narrative. The cab veers off familiar roads, and the driver’s small talk grows uncanny—specific in ways it shouldn’t be, evasive in ways that sharpen paranoia. Late‑night Seoul becomes an echo chamber for the thoughts Kyung‑rae’s tried to drown with noise: career pressure, infidelity, and the quiet terror of being seen for who you’ve become. The car is a perfect cage; your phone lights up with messages you don’t want to read, the meter climbs, and every new turn feels like a choice you already regret. That single card becomes a dare: are you brave enough to admit you might be the danger in your own story?
The panic spikes when Kyung‑rae acts—violently and irrevocably—and the film refuses to cut away from the aftermath. In the silence that follows, he’s left with a body, a steering wheel slick in his hands, and a question that cannibalizes him: what if he was wrong? The haunting that ensues isn’t Gothic; it’s psychological, a series of intrusions that might be ghosts or guilt‑born hallucinations. Faces he knows begin appearing where they shouldn’t, and the taxi’s mirrors catch reflections that accuse instead of confirm. Have you ever replayed a decision until the replay replaced your memory of it? Tarot makes that loop into horror, letting the Fool card’s promise of new beginnings rot into madness.
The third tale, “Please Throw It Away,” introduces Dong‑in, a star delivery rider nicknamed “Delivery King,” hustling toward a dream of launching his own courier startup. On an ordinary job, he finds the High Priestess card and lands at a building whose corridors feel too long, the air too still. A customer asks him for something off‑script—“Please throw this away”—just trash, just one more favor in a city that eats favors. The request is small enough to accept and big enough to sour your stomach, and the card burns in his pocket like a question he shouldn’t answer. If you’ve ever worked the gig economy, you know this calculus: help the customer, hit the quota, ignore the chill. Dong‑in says yes, and the story slides into nightmare with the quiet certainty of a GPS rerouting you to a place you shouldn’t go.
Time starts to buckle. Dong‑in returns to the same elevator, the same hallway, the same door—each loop slightly wrong, as if the building is remembering him more clearly than he remembers himself. Objects he set down move between loops; messages on his phone shift and contradict, like a scam text that somehow knows your name. The woman at the door seems to know him from a life he hasn’t lived yet, and the trash he’s carrying grows heavier in ways trash cannot. It’s a brilliant update of urban horror, steeped in the anxiety of deliveries, CCTV blind spots, and too‑quiet lobbies at 2 a.m. If cybersecurity protects our data, what protects our sense of reality when the night repeats itself? The High Priestess card becomes both map and trap, refusing to be discarded no matter how many times he tries.
As Dong‑in’s world unravels, the film lets everyday details become instruments of dread: the vibration of an incoming order, the greenish glow of an exit sign, the scuff of his own shoes sounding like someone else’s. He makes the logical choices—document the delivery, phone a colleague, ditch the card—and each one amplifies the wrongness. Have you had that sensation, that the building itself is listening? The loops force him to notice what he’s trained himself to ignore: the loneliness of working fast enough to be seen but not known. The curse exposes his private ambition and his willingness to shave minutes off the truth. By the time he finally faces what he’s been “carrying,” the horror isn’t just supernatural—it’s moral.
Threading through all three stories is a quiet thesis about choice: the card doesn’t create your worst self, it accelerates your collision with it. Ji‑woo’s fear of not being present, Kyung‑rae’s panic about being exposed, Dong‑in’s hustle that cuts corners—all of them meet versions of themselves they’d rather not acknowledge. The sociocultural texture matters: single‑parent night shifts, corporate shame in an image‑conscious society, and the relentless pace of app‑based work where customers rate your humanity with stars. Tarot doesn’t sermonize; it shows how ordinary compromises become cracks where curses slip in. The anthology form makes that point cleanly—a different life, a different card, the same hinge of choice. When the deck passes, you’ll feel it like a draft under your own door.
Tarot originated alongside a seven‑episode TV project and was released theatrically first as a three‑part feature; that origin explains the precision of each chapter’s set‑up and payoff. You can feel the series DNA in the way the stories open on a card and end with a grim explanation, and yet the feature edit flows, building a shared mood of urban isolation. In some regions, the anthology concept would later find a streaming audience, but this film cut stands on its own as a tight, 94‑minute descent across three lives. What hooked me wasn’t just the scares; it was the film’s empathy for people doing their best in systems that reward speed over safety and surface over truth. Have you ever wanted a do‑over more than you wanted the truth? Tarot makes you sit with the truth instead—and that’s the scariest room in the house.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
The Wheel of Fortune under fluorescent lights: Ji‑woo flips a card at the register, the Wheel of Fortune spinning in washed‑out store light, and for a second it looks like a game. The camera lingers just long enough to let us think she can choose not to care. Then her phone vibrates with her daughter’s first uneasy text, and the wheel stops feeling playful. The scene nails how dread begins in tiny, ignorable ripples, not orchestral stabs. You can practically hear your own “it’s probably nothing” become the curse’s first yes.
The attic ladder: Back home, Ji‑woo yanks down the attic ladder and pauses at the threshold, listening to a silence that sounds occupied. No storm, no music—just wood, dust, and breath. The film lets the shot breathe, and that patience makes the distorted “Santa” arrival feel like an intrusion into real life rather than a costume reveal. The attic becomes a confession booth where she confronts all the minutes she traded for wages. Her sprint to her child lands because we’ve all sprinted through our own versions of that fear.
The taxi’s wrong turn: Kyung‑rae’s driver eases past a familiar intersection, and everything inside the car shifts a centimeter—the rear‑view angle, the hum of the engine, Kyung‑rae’s breathing. It’s almost nothing, and that’s exactly why it works. The meter ticks louder, the radio static flirts with voices, and the Fool card peeks like it’s waiting for him to admit what he suspects. This moment captures paranoia’s first bloom: logic still holds, but your gut is already running. The city outside looks the same, which somehow makes it worse.
The irreversible blow: When Kyung‑rae lashes out, the film frames him in the cramped geometry of the car—console, seat back, window—so the violence feels close and clumsy. There’s no catharsis, only the instant, spreading stain of consequences. The silence after is the loudest sound in the movie, and you can feel the air grow heavier with what can’t be undone. His breathing, the dead weight, the realization—it’s a horror scene that doubles as a moral inventory. From here on, the taxi is a haunted room that moves.
The trash bag request: “Please throw it away,” the woman says, and Dong‑in hesitates with the bag in his hand—thin plastic, unknown weight. Every courier knows this moment: do you bend the rule to be “helpful,” or protect yourself and say no? The hallway is too quiet, the door barely open, the High Priestess card warm in his pocket. It’s a knife‑edge of etiquette and self‑preservation, and he steps the wrong way. The loop that follows makes that small yes feel like a signature on a contract he didn’t read.
The card that won’t burn: In a late‑night attempt to end it, Dong‑in tries to destroy the card, but ash refuses to behave like ash. The effect is simple and devastating—the physical world won’t cooperate with the logic that should save him. When he looks down and the card is back in his hand, it’s the cleanest image of a curse I’ve seen in years. You can sense his ambitions curdle into desperation in that cut. It’s the moment the story stops being odd and becomes inescapable.
Memorable Lines
“Keep the phone with you, baby. Don’t hang up.” —Ji‑woo, voice trembling between a mother’s calm and a siren It’s a plea disguised as instruction. In that instant, the film turns a video call—a daily lifeline for working parents—into a tightrope stretched over fear. You hear the apology inside the sentence, for the shift, for not being home. The line ricochets through the rest of her story, making every second away feel like a choice with teeth.
“It’s just a card. Watch—nothing happens.” —Kyung‑rae, bluffing the dark Hubris is a classic horror trigger, and this is the modern, tired version of it. He tries to bully fate with bravado, the way we all sometimes laugh at what scares us. The line curdles fast when the road veers, turning his swagger into a countdown. From here, every attempt to reassert control only proves how little he has.
“Please… just throw it away.” —The woman at the door, too polite by half The words are ordinary; the emphasis is not. They sit on the edge where customer service meets personal safety, a space gig workers navigate every hour. Dong‑in’s reluctance is all over his face, and the politeness traps him more effectively than a threat would. It’s a perfect example of how Tarot turns social niceties into snares.
“I’m almost home.” —Kyung‑rae, lying to himself and the night The taxi glides through streets that look familiar, but the sentence sounds like an incantation, not a report. He says it to steady his hands, to restore a world where destinations are certain. Instead, the words expose how lost he is—in streets, in life, in his own reflection. By the time he reaches “home,” the concept has collapsed.
“I’ll be right back.” —Ji‑woo, at the door that starts everything It’s the line every parent uses, and the one they dread being wrong about. The movie turns it into a thesis: what if right back becomes too late? Her story transforms the most mundane promise into a haunted refrain. After Tarot, you hear this sentence and feel the weight of all the seconds it stands in for.
Why It's Special
A chilly wind runs through Tarot from its very first image, and not just because it’s a horror film. Built from three interlocking short stories, the Korean theatrical cut distills a seven-episode concept into a lean, 94-minute experience that feels like a whispered dare: what if a single choice flipped your fate? Premiering in Korean theaters on June 14, 2024, the film version has since circulated across Asia while its companion short‑form series streamed on U+ Mobile TV and, in select regions, on services like Watcha and Viu. As of November 2025, the film cut isn’t streaming in the United States; availability remains regional, so American viewers may need to watch for limited screenings or future digital releases. And a quick heads‑up to avoid confusion: this Korean anthology is different from the 2024 Hollywood movie of the same name that’s now on Netflix.
Tarot’s hook is simple and unsettling: ordinary Seoulites discover a tarot card and their lives bend in the opposite direction of what the card seems to promise. The film stitches together three stories—Santa’s Visit, Going Home, and Please Throw It Away—each tonally distinct yet bound by a steady drip of dread. The anthology format gives the movie a rhythmic pulse: a lullaby of everyday life, then the spike of the uncanny.
Director Ashbun (Choi Byung‑gil) shoots with a grounded, near‑documentary touch—overheard phone calls, jittery taxi windows, the fluorescent hush of convenience stores—so the supernatural arrives like a draft under a door you forgot to lock. He’s said he wanted real‑life characters and a quasi‑documentary approach, and that intention shows: the camera treats the city like a living alibi that eventually falls apart. Have you ever felt this way—safe in routine—until a small omen made everything tilt?
Kyung Min‑sun’s writing threads the literal and the metaphorical with clever cruelty. The cards don’t merely “predict”; they bait. Meanings reverse, outcomes mock the bravado of certainty, and the anthology’s design lets each moral ricochet off the next. It’s horror as a test of interpretation: your life is a reading, and you might be the only one reading it wrong.
What anchors the fear is how recognizably human these stories are. A working mother’s guilty dash home, a penitent husband’s midnight ride, a delivery rider’s hustle in a city that treats time like money—Tarot maps familiar pressures onto spectral traps. The result is genre with fingerprints: you feel the weight of childcare, the shame of secrets, the exhaustion of gig work, before anything monstrous shows its face.
Performance is the movie’s secret weapon. One segment throbs with maternal panic, another with the nauseous self-justification of a man who’s made one bad decision too many, and the finale rides the raw nerves of a young courier who thinks momentum is the same as control. That variety gives the film an emotional spread—sorrow, anxiety, bravado—that lingers longer than any jump scare.
And because Tarot compresses three tales into one feature, it moves like a thriller while preserving the reflective aftertaste of literary horror. Each ending feels like drawing a new card and discovering it was always yours. The closing moments echo long after the credits, the way an unwelcome prediction echoes in your head even when you swear you don’t believe.
Popularity & Reception
Tarot opened into a ferocious summer corridor in Korea led by Inside Out 2, which dominated the local box office throughout mid‑to‑late June 2024. That crowded landscape meant a modest theatrical footprint for this smaller, mood‑driven horror, yet its word‑of‑mouth traveled beyond its initial run.
Before release, Contents Panda pre‑sold the film across Asia—Taiwan, Mongolia, Indonesia, Vietnam—signaling that omnibus Korean horror still travels well. The companion series then expanded the audience even further, with LG Uplus’ STUDIO X+U reporting sales into dozens of territories. For a compact anthology, Tarot punched above its weight internationally.
Festival attention helped. Tarot became the first Korean work officially invited to compete in Canneseries’ Short Form competition, a spotlight that reframed it not just as seasonal horror but as a formally playful project blurring the line between series and film. That hybrid identity—series DNA, feature edit—turned into a selling point with global buyers.
Press reactions ranged from intrigued to measured, praising the concept and performances while noting the natural constraints of compressing episodic material into a feature runtime. In Southeast Asian and K‑culture outlets, coverage emphasized the anthology’s everyday‑life set‑ups, its social undercurrents, and the curiosity around an idol‑turned‑actor stepping into a horror lead.
As for availability, the film cut has shown up on regional platforms like Watcha, with the short‑form series rolling out on U+ Mobile TV and licensed in select markets via Viu; however, U.S. streaming remains elusive as of November 2025. That mismatch has also fueled online confusion with the unrelated U.S. film of the same title that hit Netflix stateside—another reminder of how global distribution can scramble discovery for niche gems.
Cast & Fun Facts
Cho Yeo‑jeong anchors Santa’s Visit with a performance that turns maternal warmth into a live wire. You can almost hear her heartbeat in every cutaway as a working mom watches, from a flickering phone screen, the safety of her home slip out of reach. It’s a portrait of responsibility weaponized by fear—where the real horror is time itself moving too slowly to save a child.
For audiences who discovered her through Parasite, watching Cho play terror without surrendering intelligence feels especially satisfying. She builds tension with micro‑hesitations, gentling her voice to protect a daughter one second, then hardening it the next to face whatever waits in the dark. It’s stardom repurposed as empathy.
Ko Kyu‑pil carries Going Home like a man walking on a tightrope he can’t see. In a taxi that won’t go where he thinks it will, he lets guilt seep in at the edges of bravado until panic takes the wheel. The beauty of his work is how recognizably human it is: a bad hunch, a worse choice, and the dawning horror that there’s no undo button.
Ko’s long résumé as a scene‑stealer pays off here; he threads dark humor through dread in a way that makes the floor drop out when the truth arrives. You feel the shame, the defensive jokes, the “I had to” logic. Then the silence after. It’s one of those roles that turns a character actor into a moral compass—by spinning it.
Dex (Kim Jin‑young) closes the film with Please Throw It Away, playing a veteran delivery rider whose hustle runs smack into the supernatural. He rides like the city owes him a future; the story punishes that certainty, and Dex meets it with raw, athletic intensity—sweat, skids, swallowed pride.
What makes his segment extra compelling is context: this is his scripted acting debut after reality‑show fame, and he approaches it with candid humility, even bracing for criticism during press. The result isn’t a stunt; it’s commitment. You can see why the director bet on his presence.
Park Ha‑sun appears across the broader Tarot project as a mother navigating status anxiety and social cruelty, and that DNA permeates the film’s worldview—fear doesn’t just stalk; it ostracizes. Her screen persona has long balanced composure with fracture, and that tension enriches the anthology’s take on class and care.
Her casting also helped the series version catch fire abroad, with international buyers responding to the combination of marquee faces and high‑concept horror. Even when her episode isn’t in the theatrical cut, the film still feels lit by the same thematic electricity she brings to the IP.
Seo Ji‑hoon threads youth and yearning through the Tarot universe, a presence that reminds you how often Korean genre pieces smuggle romance‑adjacent tenderness into fear. His recent run in dramas has honed an earnest intensity that colors even his brief moments here.
That continuity matters. Because when the anthology asks whether people can change the direction of their lives, Seo’s quiet, searching energy makes the question ache rather than just spook. He gives the franchise a heartbeat that thumps beneath the scares.
Lee Joo‑bin leaves sharp impressions with limited screen time, a sleek apparition of modern Seoul whose image keeps reappearing like a sign you can’t stop noticing. Her presence turns billboards and screens into part of the menace—technology as a reflective surface for fear.
She’s also a bridge for new viewers who discovered her in Queen of Tears; that familiarity becomes a lure, then a trap, in the best horror‑anthology sense. Recognition sets expectations the story can break.
Hahm Eun‑jung (Eunjung of T‑ara) represents another kind of Tarot magic: the idol‑actor with bona fide genre chops. Her career has long flirted with horror, and her appearances within the larger project underline how the franchise taps talent comfortable with tonal whiplash—sweet one beat, stiletto‑sharp the next.
That flexibility pays off for audiences who come for the music‑star curiosity and stay for the acting. It’s also part of why the IP traveled so well internationally: the cast list reads like a map of Korean pop culture fluency, and Hahm is a fluent speaker.
Finally, a word on the creative core: director Choi Byung‑gil and writer Kyung Min‑sun design Tarot as a two‑way mirror—genre facing us, realism reflected back. Choi’s “documentary‑style” ethos and Kyung’s reversal‑heavy plotting make the cards feel both mystical and cruelly rational. Together they craft a city of omens where every choice costs, and every cost is counted.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If you crave horror that stares straight at everyday anxieties—parenting, pride, work—Tarot is a small, unnerving triumph. Keep an eye on regional rights; if you travel, a reputable VPN for streaming and flexible streaming services can help you understand what’s available legally in your temporary location. When the film lands for rental, consider watching on a bright 4K TV in a dark room and, if you’re budgeting, a cash‑back credit card on digital purchases never hurts. Until then, remember: sometimes the scariest prophecy is the one you write for yourself.
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