‘Ballad Of A Small Player’ review: Colin Farrell is on a losing streak in Edward Berger’s gambling drama

Dir: Edward Berger. UK. 2025. 103mins

Ballad Of A Small Participant is a playing movie that overplays its hand. Edward Berger’s hyper-stylish adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel stars a queasily compelling Colin Farrell as an Irishman with a shady previous hiding out in Macao, pretending to be a high-roller. Playfully, virtually proudly shallow because it feeds off the feverish highs and lows of its addicted protagonist, this neo-noir affords loads of buzzy delight — that’s, till the story’s pretensions deliver down the entire home of playing cards.

The image’s tone-poem intoxication begins to develop stale

Screening in Telluride and Toronto, the movie will open theatrically within the US on October 15 and within the UK two days later earlier than streaming on Netflix beginning October 29. Berger’s final two options, All Quiet On The Western Entrance and Conclave, had been main awards-season gamers, however this new, much less overtly ‘status’ image could have a more durable time courting voters. Nonetheless, a roguish Farrell will elevate Ballad’s profile, and he’s joined by Tilda Swinton because the oddball investigator on his character’s path.

Lord Doyle (Farrell) is a solitary, mustachioed man dwelling in an opulent resort room in Macau, spending most of his waking hours taking part in baccarat on the on line casino. However Doyle’s luck has been depressing of late, and he desperately wants a scorching streak to repay the huge sums he owes the resort lest administration kick him out. Including to his worries is the arrival of Cynthia (Swinton), who has been employed to gather the cash he stole as a part of his murky life again in England.

Draped in blinding-white fluorescent lights and vibrant neon, Ballad imagines Macau’s huge playing mecca as a decadent, alien fantasyland, with each gliding monitoring shot and canted angle heightening the surrealism of this excessive locale. Aided by All Quiet On The Western Entrance cinematographer James Pal, the director’s extravagant visible method makes each super-saturated scene pop – even when Rowan Joffe’s screenplay doesn’t have a lot new to say in regards to the chokehold that playing habit has on its victims.

Doyle decks himself out in flamboyant fits and slicks again his lustrous hair, fastidiously manufacturing an elegant-bachelor persona for the world. Rapidly, although, we recognise how hole that packaging is — and are usually not stunned within the least to finally uncover that Lord Doyle will not be his precise title. Affected by debilitating panic assaults, consuming far an excessive amount of, and right down to his previous few {dollars}, Doyle is a drowning man failing to maintain his head above water.

Because the stakes hold getting raised, Farrell grows extra frenetic and sweaty, virtually as if the screaming anxiousness the gambler is making an attempt to maintain bottled up would possibly rip him aside at any second. His magnetic efficiency incorporates occasional hints of comedian exasperation alongside a lizard-y appeal because the character tries to sweet-talk his manner out of his newest jam. Usually, Doyle turns to the one sympathetic soul in his life, on line casino worker Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who has a cautious affection for this good-looking scoundrel.

In reality, the surface forces demanding their cash are sometimes of secondary significance to Ballad’s actual function, which is to marvel at an inveterate liar satisfied the faux-suave raconteur he’s peddling may some day be the true him. In restricted doses, Berger’s deliberately showy method deftly mirrors Doyle’s swaggering artifice, the movie and the character feeding off one another. Ballad desires us to embrace Doyle as a moody antihero, the debt collectors scorching on his heels an outward manifestation of the buried demons he’s been working away from for years.

However the image’s tone-poem intoxication begins to develop stale, the skinny story burdened by late-reel twists that pressure so as to add gravitas to the proceedings. Plus, as soon as the viewers learns Doyle’s secrets and techniques, Ballad loses its aura, leaving us with only one extra story of a luckless gambler stumbling towards his shot at redemption. As for the overly mousy Cynthia, the antagonistic character grants the ever-shapeshifting Swinton a chance to attempt on one more quirky affectation, full with dangerous hair, droopy socks and unflattering eyeglasses. It’s a really mannered flip — and positively not certainly one of her greatest bets.