Direction: Edward Berger
Country: USA
From Conclave’s Swiss-Austrian director Edward Berger, Ballad of a Small Player is an adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name. Not a groundbreaking work, this oddly psychological gambling drama oscillates between reality and fantasy, carrying a faint but persistent aura of supernatural eeriness.
Colin Farrell stars as Lord Doyle, a ruthless gambler with a battered conscience who heads to the gambling mecca of Macau in a desperate attempt to manage his mounting debts. The situation is increasingly dire, yet the stubbornly optimistic Doyle refuses to surrender, especially after meeting Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a lonely woman working at the casino where he plays. What he cannot escape, however, is Betty Grayson (Tilda Swinton), a private detective and debt collector who knows far too much about his murky past.
Berger is unafraid to take big swings, staging sharp contrasts between moments of crushing despair and others of intoxicating invincibility and ecstasy. Farrell embodies this compulsive risk-taker with such uncompromised honesty that his performance can only be called courageous. Still, some of Doyle’s actions remain deliberately opaque, leaving the viewer suspended in a state of ambiguity that is both intriguing and occasionally exasperating.
Drenched in saturated colors and striking, vivid imagery, and populated by a few characters that verge on the cartoonish, Ballad of a Small Player is far from Berger’s strongest effort. Alongside Conclave (2024), his filmography includes Jack (2014) and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Yet this film retains its share of compelling moments. Presented as a nightmarish, old-fashioned character study, it probes the tension-fueled psyche of addiction before drifting toward ideas of redemption and lost love. The film never quite coheres as a whole, and its twists are unlikely to astonish, but Farrell remains a constant source of fascination. Once you surrender to its rhythm, it’s a film that carries you along, unevenly but smoothly.
