Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | Film | September 14, 2025
Flashing lights, gorgeous locales, and velvet suits for days, Ballad of a Small Player is a neon nightmare, or cyber-lit dream for card players and drama fans hungry for Edward Berger’s latest. The snappy political scented epic, Conclave, put the director firmly into awards conversations, and he’s returned with a new kind of tale that’s less physically grounded and sheds the ensemble for a study of one man.
Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) is a snappily dressed man though he’s often drenched in stress sweat that smells of last night’s libations. Though he walks and talks like a high roller to whom money is a toy, the man bopping around Macau is deep in gambling debt and fighting a tight timeline. With his hotel demanding payment of his bill and his casino credits maxed out, Doyle is forced to hit that last big hand in order to keep his life and body parts. To him, it’s just about getting the right dollar on the right table, but to his debtors, it’s about coughing up the money he promises he already has. When things get too far out of hand, Doyle loses his grasp on the right way out and tumbles into a string of love, loss, and luck to try and pull himself from a hell of his own making.
Ballad of a Small Player is a gorgeously staged visual spectacle that uses plush velvet and sunlight to turn up the technicolor of Macau casinos and sharp dressed magnates. It all feels dreamlike from its opening, which leaves the audience guessing just when Doyle’s experiences become non-corporeal. Though named for a romantic tune, this movie is more of a biblical fable that follows a gambling addict’s descent to hell after he’s given a choice and opts to engage in the deadly sins. Though ambitious in its structure, its attempts to tether to reality before beginning its abstract descent leave the story difficult to absorb and indulge in. Its messaging and metaphors toggle between being too clearly described or too difficult to understand, and subtlety becomes the enemy of a movie where its lead wears ascots. Berger seems enamored with stories of rich religious rituals and the fallible people who follow them, but his mashup of iconography culminates in a confused white man latching himself onto an Asian woman who speaks in maxims.
Performances keep this film’s heart beating, and much like in Conclave, they’re elevated by the craft in costuming and set design. Swinton is a chameleon, and her dress and mannerisms as a pathetic woman who could be romanced by an even more pathetic man she is chasing is gorgeous and believable, if in this world or not. Farrell continues to prove he is one of the greatest actors of a generation, playing through his own character’s lies with a dynamic performance that requires him to mismatch his eyes and mouth. His performance is as physical as it is mental, and his lush painted styling lost in liminal spaces feels like a gorgeous rendering of The Shining.
Ballad of a Small Player doesn’t have the confidence or coherence to tell the abstract tale it wants to tell and will thus not necessarily grab an audience look for a Rounders style story of “get the money before time runs out.” But when paired with feasts for the eyes and a glowing performance from Farrell, it could be an unassuming biblical warning against even the sorts of vices that make us feel untouchable by gods and devils alike.
Ballad of a Small Player played the Toronto International Film Festival and is set to hit theaters October 15, 2025 and Netflix on October 29, 2025
