Oct 20

Oct 20 Movie Review : Ballad of a Small Player (2025)

The worst decision Colin Farrell ever made for his career was putting a blond wig on his head to play Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s catastrophic 2004 biopic, a three-hour fever dream of hubris and eyeliner. It wasn’t just a bad look; it was a career-threatening kind of stupid. But the thing about Farrell is that he never actually fell. He just waited for culture to realize that being weirdly intense and inexplicably tragic is more interesting than being perfect.

For almost thirty years now, the man’s been so consistently magnetic that he can carry a movie that doesn’t really deserve him, like Edward Berger’s new movie Ballad of a Small Player. It’s a beautiful, slightly pointless fever of a film, a hangover you can’t stop watching even if you’re never sure why. . Farrell’s character moves through it like a ghost who refuses to fade, and somehow, by the end, you’re almost convinced that it actually means something.

Ballad of a Small Player is an adaptation from a 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne. It features Lord Doyle (Farrell), a degenerate brit gambling away every last penny he owns in Macau casinos. As he keeps racking debts, a mysterious pit boss named Dao Ming (Fala Chen) offers him a lifeline and like all desperate men, he starts reading way too much into it and he tries his shot at redemption, but it’s never really made clear what redemption actually means in this movie.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe redemption’s just another bet he doesn’t understand.

Casinos, what about them?

So yeah, this is a gorgeous looking movie about Colin Farrell wandering through Macau’s casinos like a man allergic to stability: stressed about money, but physically incapable of not spending it. It’s hard to tell whether he’s actually serious of if he’s just an irresponsible hog on a bender and being a dick on purpose. His logic’s circular: gamble to survive, lose to feel alive. Then he meets someone who makes him want to be better, which of course only makes him worse.

He starts doing irresponsible things in the name of responsibility: paying off debts as a moral stance. None of this makes sense, but addiction rarely does.

Ballad of a Small Player runs on two engines: 1) Colin Farrell playing a sad man who tells himself stories about why he’s sad, and 2) the stories he tells himself about Dao Ming. The first part works, mostly because Tilda Swinton floats in and out of the movie as what I like to call the :"ghost of Christmas past". She’s never dangerous, but she’s unnerving. She reminds Doyle of everything he’s pretending not to be, and his reaction is pure avoidance: pay the debt, rewrite the story, make peace with his own moral bankruptcy.

The second part is trickier. Doyle convinces himself Dao Ming is some kind of angel of redemption, but she kind of is, in a weird and bleak way. She rescues him from financial collapse just to drown him in guilt, which feels less like grace and more like irony. In the long, sorry history of underwritten female characters, Dao Ming’s a podium finisher. But to be fair, she half-exists inside Doyle’s delusion, which might be the point.

You can’t really fault her for being thinly written when that’s exactly what the movie’s about: men inventing women as moral shortcuts, as if salvation can be outsourced. It’s hard to say what Ballad of a Small Player is really trying to express, besides the idea that smart, horny men are capable of incredible delusion when left unsupervised.

But The Casinos Do Look Great

This is an Edward Berger movie, which means it looks fucking incredible.He’s the same guy who gave us last year’s Conclave, a Vatican-meets-WWE power struggle that somehow made papal politics feel like a cage match. That alone was reason enough for me to show up to Ballad of a Small Player. I’ve got a weakness for neon-soaked melancholy, and Berger absolutely indulges it. But what separates this from other neon galores is that his glow feels haunted. Every color hums with unease.

Every light source flickers like it’s trying to warn you about something. It’s a beautiful movie that seems to know beauty won’t save anyone, which might be why I couldn’t look away. The night in Macau feels ferocious and volatile. Statues stare down like silent judges. Clouds move in to block redemption. Cold concrete has colonized every inch of color the neon can’t reach. There’s a quiet misery pulsing beneath the city’s glow, a kind of human tax no one notices except the camera.

Doyle doesn’t see it. None of the other shitty tourists do. But Edward Berger does.

So is Ballad of a Small Player any good? It’s aggressively OK and I suspect the novel probably is too. It’s a gorgeous setting in search of an interesting person, which is exactly how Macau or Vegas can feel on the wrong kind of night. These aren’t the nights you remember; they’re the ones you compress into a thirty-second montage inside a better movie.

I don’t need another film to remind me that money is evil. I get it. What I want is a story that makes recklessness feel almost rational that shows me the one scenario where gambling everything might actually make sense. Ballad of a Small Player doesn’t do that. It just looks amazing while losing the plot, which I guess makes it the perfect movie about addiction. Maybe a wig would've helped (or not).