A deep-pocketed neon-noir starring Colin Farrell as an inveterate gambling addict and see-thru fraud who has three days to fork up the $45,000 USD he owes to his Macau hotel and casino (lest he be deported back to England, or worse), Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player” sounds like a mighty decent bet on paper. And yet something is off from the moment it starts with Farrell’s Lord Doyle groaning “fuck” into the bathroom mirror, as if he’s just noticed it too.
The situation doesn’t need long to grow more ominous from there, as Volker Bertelmann’s thunderous string and horn score — squelching in your face like a wet fart throughout the course of a movie that’s meant to feel like a fever dream — accompanies the arch comedy of watching our protagonist try to slip out of his penthouse suite without getting caught. There’s a Coen brothers’-like smirk to Lord Doyle’s cartoon obviousness, but that doesn’t stop Berger from shooting the sequence like it’s straight out of “Conclave,” all straight lines and holy purpose.
Anyone with eyes can see that Lord Doyle is an impostor (his green velvet suit screams “I’m bluffing!” loud enough for people to understand it in every language, which is extra silly for someone who exclusively plays a pure luck game like baccarat), but that isn’t enough for locals to notice a gweilo like him. In a place built on empty promises, a peninsula whose Eiffel Tower is a copy of a copy of the real one in Paris, he’s just another lie that doesn’t even have the heart to believe in itself.
The only problem there is that “Ballad of a Small Player” suffers from the same half-defeated identity crisis; much like our dear Doyle (or whatever his real name is), Berger’s film is so desperate for a win that it loses any real sense of what the stakes are. Despite promising a welcome throwback to the sort of down-and-out milieu that authors like Graham Greene once put on the map, this Lawrence Osborne adaptation winds up feeling like nothing so much as a quintessential Netflix movie: Easy to watch and impossible to care about.
I’ll say this in its favor: Watching Doyle eat a meal is possibly one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever seen on the big screen, and I would have to imagine that its horror will translate to small ones as well. The man is rapacious — a hungry ghost with a big mouth and an empty stomach. He shoves food into his maw like a human No-Face, and his entire body trembles while he does it, as if Doyle is trying to survive his acute gambling withdrawal by distracting his other senses. Every bite feels like his last, and yet he’s also convinced that a single lucky streak is all he needs to clear his debts. Alas, there are some debts that can’t be repaid. There are some stains that don’t wash out. There are some problems that money can’t solve.
One of them seems to be private investigator Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton, splitting the difference between “Michael Clayton” and “Snowpiercer” with a pro forma performance memorable only for the glasses she gets to wear), who’s been hired to secure photographic evidence that Doyle is hiding out in Macau. More susceptible to money — or at least more understanding of why Doyle tries to buy his way out of everything — is an enigmatic Rainbow Casino employee named Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who watches the Englishman blow a fortune at her baccarat table only to be endeared by his lost soul sloppiness. Chen is the wraith-like heart of this story, but her character strains belief even in a shaky hand of a movie that operates with all the internal logic of a gambling addiction.
Then again, so does everything else in “Ballad of a Small Player,” which reshuffles its cards so often that you start to wonder if it’s playing with a full deck. Switching gears between heightened comedy, self-destructive bender, ex-pat farce, and an empty meditation on the relationship between capitalism and shame, Berger’s film doesn’t juggle genres so much as it careens out of control between them, its crumbling hero too narcissistic for anything to matter beyond the tunnel vision of his next line of credit.
Of course, Doyle is only looking for loans while he bides his time for a miracle, but it’s going to take something a bit more proactive than that in order to cleanse him of the sins that he’s been trying so hard to outrun, or at least out bet. “You can be anyone in Macau,” Doyle tells Cynthia as part of a sales pitch to leave him alone and “live a little,” but Doyle — who’s already faked his own death once — will have to become someone if he hopes to survive.
This movie tries its best to nudge him in the right direction, but the path it offers him to rock bottom — and to the redemption that lies beyond it — proves exasperating. It’s some consolation that Doyle travels along the scenic route, as James Friend’s ultra-wide cinematography allows the purgatorial casinos of Macau to look as sterile as the fluorescent streets outside are aglow with sizzle and seduction. Still, the film’s rich sense of place never catalyzes into a legitimate atmosphere, which makes it that much harder to reconcile the “fun” of Berger’s tone and the flustered charisma of Farrell’s performance with the soul rot on display.
“Ballad of a Small Player” mines so much of its queasy momentum from Lord Doyle’s relentless desperation and refusal to give up, but the movie doesn’t give us much of a reason not to throw in the towel. Doyle’s luck might turn before the end of this story — ours will not.
Grade: C
“Ballad of a Small Player” premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release it in select theaters on Friday, October 17, and on Netflix on Wednesday, October 29.
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