THE STORY – Lord Doyle is laying low in Macau – spending his days and nights on the casino floors, drinking heavily and gambling what little money he has left. Struggling to keep up with his fast-rising debts, he is offered a lifeline by the mysterious Dao Ming, a casino employee with secrets of her own. However, in hot pursuit is Betty Grayson – a private investigator ready to confront Doyle with what he is running from. As Doyle tries to climb to salvation, the confines of reality start to close in.
THE CAST – Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings & Tilda Swinton
THE TEAM – Edward Berger (Director) & Rowan Joffé (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 101 Minutes
Director Edward Berger’s latest film, “Ballad of a Small Player,” opens with a single word that instantly captures the movie’s tone: “Fuck.” Colin Farrell’s Lord Doyle mutters it as he awakes in his lavish yet filthy Macau hotel room, already staring into the abyss of his own downfall. It’s not just a profanity of resignation, it’s the sigh of someone who knows he’s finished before the day even begins. From that moment on, Berger drops us into a neon-soaked character study of gambling and feverish despair, anchored by one of Farrell’s most physically demanding and strongest performances to date.
Doyle is no lord, though he carries himself with the false entitlement of someone clinging to delusions of grandeur. In truth, he’s a disgraced conman turned compulsive gambler who owes his casino $352,000 in Hong Kong dollars, payable within three days. And that’s just one of many debts he owes. The locals call him a gwailou (meaning a “foreign ghost”), and the nickname fits. Doyle drifts through Macau’s casinos as if half-dead, pale and sweat-soaked, a figure suspended somewhere between life and death. His game of choice is baccarat, a quick, merciless, and high-stakes game where only two cards are dealt, and if you score nine, you win. Doyle could clear his debts and walk away for good. But both he and the audience know such outcomes belong to fantasy, not reality. His supposed lifeline arrives in the form of Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a casino employee who takes pity on him and extends him a line of credit when she has no reason to do so. Meanwhile, a private investigator, Betty Grayson (Tilda Swinton), is closing in on Doyle, hired to expose his activities and recover what he owes one of her clients. As Doyle spirals deeper into his debts, visions of his impending death blur the line between reality and delusion, leaving him stranded in a kind of purgatory where true escape may be impossible.
Adapted from Lawrence Osborne’s novel, “Ballad of a Small Player” charts Doyle’s descent with operatic energy and a hallucinatory atmosphere. The narrative positions Doyle and Dao Ming as lost spirits who find one another, but their romance feels half-formed, essentially because Farrell and Chen share little chemistry together. Without a strong emotional pull, the story’s promise of redemption feels muted and becomes increasingly muddier as it progresses through the inferior second half. What lingers more powerfully is the sense of danger looming over Doyle at every turn. The violence here is psychological rather than physical, forcing the audience to watch a man destroy himself from the inside out. Swinton, as always, brings a captivating presence to the screen, though the script gives her little to do.
For all its bravura, where “Ballad of a Small Player” falters is in its rhythm. The cycles of indulgence repeat until they lose impact, and without a convincing romance, combined with the muddled ghostly visions, the film sometimes feels more numbing than illuminating. Doyle’s indulgences (the champagne, food, and cigars he claims to despise) read less as luxuries than self-destructive impulses, mirroring the cycles of gambling he cannot escape. Banned from nearly every casino, he continues to chase the next hand, even as visions of his own death crowd his mind. Berger channels this ambiguity into Macau itself: a neon-lit personal hell reflecting Doyle’s fractured psyche, at once intoxicating but also damning. Yet the film never feels as disciplined or cohesive as “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “Conclave,” with its second half losing almost all the momentum generated in the first half.
At the core of it all stands Farrell, delivering one of the best performances of his career. His trembling hands and desperate eyes give Doyle a fragile sense of humanity underneath all the self-inflicted devastation. Farrell has long excelled at playing broken men, but with this showcase role here he pushes further, embodying a figure at once pathetic and magnetic, making him impossible to look away from. In his bright crimson suit, he looks like a man trying to be noticed even as he’s already fading.
Berger matches Farrell’s commitment with top-tier crafts. Academy Award-winning cinematographer James Friend saturates the screen in radiant reds, golds, and greens, mirroring Doyle’s manic oscillations between fleeting hope and crushing doom. Volker Bertelmann’s score thunders and swells, threatening at times to overwhelm but more often heightening the chaos Doyle inhabits. Doyle wears, what he calls his good luck yellow leather gloves at the table (although they only seem to bring him bad luck), each pull and stretch of the fabric punctuated by the sound design, heightening the tension as if the gloves themselves might snap under the weight of his obsession. Every visual and sonic choice works to externalize his unraveling state of mind.
Even when the story stumbles, Berger’s technical skill and Farrell’s all-in performance keep it engrossing. While “Ballad of a Small Player” doesn’t reach the heights of Berger’s recent cinematic triumphs, it remains a striking entry in his filmography. Its flaws are evident, but so is its ability to engage. Farrell delivers a career-highlight performance, carrying the film’s uneven weight with intensity and vulnerability. Like the game of baccarat itself, the film is a risky gamble. If you’re willing to place a bet, you may not win big, but you’ll likely have a haunting and entertaining experience, and that might be worth the hand.
