“Ballad of a Small Player” (2025) adapts Rowan Joffé’s 2014 novel about a high stakes gambler in Macau running out of money, and the bills are due. Colin Farrell plays the unlucky gambler, Lord Doyle. During the Festival of the Hungry Ghost, he meets Lady Luck in the form of Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a loan shark with a heart of gold who gambles that she can redeem Lord Doyle. Will Lord Doyle be able to break his addiction and pay his debts before it’s too late? “Conclave” director Edward Berger collaborates with Farrell to make a visually arresting film that is not necessarily good and likely problematic but is appealing despite itself.
Farrell must be as much of a gambling man as his character because he is definitely taking big swings in 2025. First, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (2025), and now “Ballad of a Small Player.” These are not conventional films, but the latter showcases Farrell’s talents as a relatively harmless fabulist compared to Tom Ripley from the Patricia Highsmith novels. Lord Doyle is constantly peacocking in loud colors with a mustache that suggests a dashing swashbuckler. He is like a big kid playing pretend, but there are no adults to tell him to cut it out and save him from himself. He is a gwái lóu, a ghost man, and in the Chinese majority country, people only care if he has money except for Kai (Alan K. Chang) and Dao Ming.
Dao Ming is an underwritten character who is basically a Magical Asian who exists in a Lars von Trier way to save Lord Doyle. A couple of factors exist that ease Chen’s heavy lifting. Farrell is hot so sure, anyone attracted to men would treat him well. Duh, I keep watching his movies. Their relationship is chaste. For all of Lord Doyle’s dissolute living, sex is not on the menu. In “Ballad of a Small Player,” Ming is facing a crisis of conscience, and Lord Doyle is in the right place at the right time to benefit from Ming becoming a softie. If you watch a lot of movies, the evolution of her character is predictable even if the way that it plays out is not. She just keeps popping up to keep Doyle afloat. There is a point in the denouement when a deep pocket gambler called Grandma (Deanie Ip), who can see spirits, basically explains the entire movie to Lord Doyle and thus the audience in the denouement.
Da Ming introduces Lord Doyle to the concept of the Festival of the Hungry Ghost, and it was a slightly different concept than the one that I was familiar with before seeing this movie. It becomes a visual and narrative theme throughout “Ballad of a Small Player.” Based on the release date, it looks like Netflix is giving an artsy fartsy twist to a Halloween movie. Berger shoots the film as if it is a magical realist film except the real ghosts are Dao Ming and Lord Doyle because of their greed and inability to satiate their hunger for money. Farrell really conveys this concept as his character basically tortures himself with gambling, food, and accommodations. Any joy occurs during victory. That’s all. That’s it.
Editor Nick Emerson keeps cutting to show how the entire city is suffering from suicidal ideation, and Lord Doyle’s imagination is almost indistinct from his reality. In a lot of ways, this film is Berger’s “The Shining” (1980) or “The Sixth Sense” (1999) except people are the walking dead because they refuse to opt out of a system that is killing them. It is a horror movie with no killer. Farrell really conveys this terror as if he is a force-fed duck before becoming foie gras, but he is the only person holding the fork. Berger shoots Farrell descending a staircase as if he is wearing anti-gravity boots and is horizontal to the floor. It is like a slow-motion fall without the mortal climax.
“Ballad of a Small Player” uses fantasy to carve a path to escape the destructive cycle. One option is returning home to face the music in the form of Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton) who is trying to get Lord Doyle to pay one of many pipers but also serves as a foil to what his life would be like if he stayed on the straight and narrow. While Lord Doyle is not an aspirational figure, Cynthia still has ambiguous feelings about him and finds him tempting. A little bit of Lord Doyle goes a long way as a carefree, fuller, vibrant version of the desperate man who comes out in quieter moments. Her effort to rein him in is a way of suppressing her forbidden desires. If this feels dissonant, it should. Doyle’s desire to exceed bounds is not innately bad under the right conditions. Another option is living a life away from temptation, which Da Ming shows him.
The final option is that one can exist in different ways in the same environment. If Doyle stayed his course, he would be like his fellow ex pat (Alex Jennings), who is “dead to shame,” and accepts being part of the living dead, enslaved to his addiction. Doyle aspires to become “free of shame.” The latter should have the disclaimer, “Do not try this at home.” The denouement becomes a Western fantasy thanks to a heavy dose of Eastern mysticism. After watching “Orwell: 2+2=5” (2025), it is impossible not to view this story without thinking of class, and colonialism as a pressure valve so have nots with the mentality of deserving an upper-class lifestyle without the means can live out that fantasy in other lands. “Ballad of a Small Player” is not redemptive though it is the aim. The only difference is the delusion, the incessant desire to be a main character.
It kind of translates off screen too. Swinton is a great actor who can do anything and is a treat to see in any movie. As a related aside, there was controversy when MCU casting directors gave the Ancient One part to Swinton, which was considered progressive because she is a woman, but a step back in terms of Asian representation. “Ballad of a Small Player” is based on a book, but it is interesting that there is no race bending that permits Swinton to play Ming and Chen to play the woman who does not believe in Doyle while simultaneously feeling an attraction. It is all very Madame Butterfly in terms of hierarchy. If the film was not set in Asia, then a woman would do, but the class and racial dynamics of who gets to live and sacrifice for someone and who needs to live a little are impossible to ignore. Does Ming even have to be a woman? Could Farrell play the loan shark who sacrifices for Ming or Blithe? Why do we want to see Doyle come out on top and not face the consequences of his actions?
If you are a fan of the cast or Berger’s visual style, “Ballad of a Small Player” is a must see on the big screen. On the small screen, it would not convey the gusto and passion of these performances, and the story’s flaws would become glaringly obvious. It is a magnificent, entrancing mess that evaporates once the lights come on.
