Ballad Of A Small Player spins out its modern Barry Lyndon situation—Doyle’s slipping upper-class English accent and distinctly not-upper-class name betraying his less-seemly origins—but this con man never has much confidence. The Lord always seems to have more sweat than swagger on hand, Farrell jittering and weepy to overcompensate for a shallow role. Attempting to emphasize the flaws in this thin façade, All Quiet An The Western Front cinematographer James Friend keeps the camera in Farrell’s pores, straining to find the handsome man’s most pathetic angles. These extreme close-ups are just the most noticeable in an arsenal of bombastic and gaudy camera moves, all of which assault the senses as aggressively as another of Volker Bertelmann’s blaring scores.
But unplug these flashing lights and turn down the volume, and there’s little to draw one into Doyle’s story. He’s clearly a low-level loser coasting off a long-ago windfall; a high-end time bomb overstuffed with champagne and lobster. But, like so many novel adaptations, Ballad Of A Small Player lacks interiority that was likely far richer on the page. Doyle is simple, a surface-level opportunist whose fear of finally colliding with the brick wall he’s been speeding towards manifests in an overactive heartbeat…and not much else. He doesn’t seem to get a high from drinking or playing cards; in fact, it seems to pain him, as he methodically, almost angrily, peels each dealt card up from the table. It’s not that he’s sick of it either, that his vice has lost its luster. He just has little connection to it. The only draw of gambling is its presence in the narrative, similar to the arbitrary connection between Doyle and betting broker Dao Ming (Fala Chen).
It wouldn’t be a dull tale of a drunken, indebted, irredeemable tourist if he wasn’t tended to by an endlessly nurturing Asian woman. The story feints at Chen’s character being just as desperate as Doyle, but she’s just another prop for his high-stakes theater. That insulting thinness couples with repetitive, broad foreshadowing around death: a Chinese phrase for being “dead to shame;” a tale about the Buddhist realm of hungry ghosts; a Hungry Ghost Festival; a fellow grifter (Alex Jennings) spinning a story about gambler’s hell; a saucy high-roller (Deanie Ip) referring to Doyle as a “gwailou,” a Cantonese gringo, a foreign ghost. The script is all but on its knees pleading for us to spot it a bit of goodwill, to give its supernatural side a chance. But as Doyle becomes increasingly haunted by his thumping heart, murmuring voices, and bad VFX, viewers become haunted by this Netflix adaptation’s low opinion of its audience. The head-clobbering telegraphing of the script seems designed for those only glancing occasionally at the screen.
But paying close attention does Ballad Of A Small Player no favors either. Berger’s skill with middlebrow crowdpleasers succumbs to empty spectacle; he can still frame a bluntly powerful shot, and he knocks off a few nice Ocean’s Eleven images, but most are just blunt. His balance between Doyle’s double-life plot and the fleeting connection he shares with Dao Ming is unfocused and haphazard. His depiction of Macau finds little to say about its surging economy, its collision of tradition and ever-escalating luxury. Rather, it’s just cliché after cliché, advertised with radiant signs in blown-out Wong Kar-wai colors. Any subtlety found in the kind of schlubby, sharp-tongued, purgatorial storytelling that Osbourne favors (see also: The Forgiven, which adapted Osbourne a few years ago) gets trumped by Berger’s over-stylized simplicity.
Director: Edward Berger
Writer: Rowan Joffé
Starring: Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings, Tilda Swinton
Release Date: October 15, 2025; October 29, 2025 (Netflix)
