In Edward Berger’s neon nightmare Ballad of a Small Player, Colin Farrell is a sweat-soaked specter haunting the casinos of Macau. The regulars he encounters often refer to him as a “Gweilo,” Cantonese for “Ghost Man,” applicable to him in many ways. First, the gambling addict is posing as Lord Doyle, though it’s quickly pointed out to him that Doyle isn’t even a posh name.
Instead, it turns out that the ex-pat is actually a man named Reilly, a con man on the run. Based on the novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne, Berger’s latest is a strange beast of a film, manic and often directionless, making some strange choices, a script and film as erratic as its central character. Berger’s gorgeous direction, Volker Bertelmann’s throbbing horns-and-strings score, and Farrell’s committed performance, Ballad of a Small Player barely manages to hold it all together, though.
Ballad of a Small player may bite off more than it can chew, and it struggles to bring all of its threads together as it careens towards a feverish conclusion that is as delirious as Farrell’s character, but it’s nonetheless an entertaining ride.
Ballad Of A Small Player Is A Flawed Film That I Couldn’t Look Away From
The first word out of Farrell’s mouth in the film is a belabored “f*ck” — he’s clearly hungover, his palatial H๏τel room littered with empty champagne bottles, dirty clothes, and overturned furniture. The Macau sunshine is as piercing as the migraine Reilly surely has and, if he could hear the music that accompanies the gorgeously debaucherous scene, it would surely get worse.
Berger gives the proceedings a sense of grandiosity in the same way he imbued Conclave‘s papal drama with a sense of ever-growing stakes. Macau is sH๏τ like a ghost town, the casinos and backdoor gambling rooms vast and hollow, the greed and compulsion of the haunting figures that populate them felt through the screen.
This is all supported by Farrell’s gonzo performance, somewhere in between the hallucinogenic panic of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the live-wire anxiety of Uncut Gems. The only problem is that Farrell rarely, if ever, leaves this register for a moment of respite. Berger’s film is operating at this level for its 100-minute runtime, which can prove exhausting and undermine any sort of development the story gestures at.
That story also involves two other figures — Tilda Swinton’s Cynthia Blithe, a delightfully kooky private investigator with a to-die-for pair of glᴀsses H๏τ on Reilly’s tail, and Fala Chen’s Dao Ming, a loan shark who gets involved with the swindler just as he’s about to spiral out of control. Both are sort of haunting Reilly themselves, representing potential outcomes for him depending on which path he chooses.
Of course, Reilly, being the gambling addict he is, is convinced that his next lucky break is right on the horizon. As he careens from casino to casino, losing every step of the way, Berger forces us to behold the self-destruction at play here. It’s not pleasant to watch, with many of Farrell’s best scenes also being deeply uncomfortable portraits of a man on the verge of losing it all, including his mind.
For what Ballad of a Small Player lacks in cohesiveness, it makes up for it in pure style. Berger’s missteps here are much more forgivable thanks to this, though when the film crescendos with a predictable twist, it can’t help but feel as if it has lost the plot. Watching a character make terrible decisions for nearly two hours is a tough ask of audiences and, though Ballad of a Small Player doesn’t fully justify its chaos, it’s an entertaining thrill ride nonetheless.
Ballad of a Small Player screened at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in limited theaters on October 15 before it is available to stream on October 29.
