📺 Edward Berger’s follow-up to back-to-back Oscar winners All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave is a bit like watching someone bet their entire stack on a single hand — bold, audacious… and ultimately a loss. Ballad of a Small Player is technically dazzling but seemingly emotionally hollow, a neon-soaked trip through Macau’s wagering underworld that looks absolutely stunning while saying surprisingly little. Or does it?

Colin Farrell stars as the fraudulent Lord Doyle, a compulsive high roller drowning in champagne bottles, unpaid hotel bills, and bad decisions. With a magnificently sleazy mustache and perpetual flop sweat, Farrell delivers a gritty, committed performance that anchors the film’s more indulgent directorial excesses. He gives a genuinely great performance — embodying a man whose desperation practically radiates off the screen even as he attempts to maintain an aloof aristocratic facade that fools absolutely no one.

The visuals will pull you in. Cinematographer James Friend transforms Macau into a fever dream of jewel tones and neon reflections. Every frame is meticulously crafted, almost aggressively gorgeous. The problem? All that beauty starts to feel numbing when there’s not much substance underneath — a cake that’s all frosting.

Berger cranks everything up to 11 —Volker Bertelmann’s bombastic score, the heightened sound design (especially those uncomfortably loud food binges), and an overall aesthetic that shouts rather than whispers. Tilda Swinton is underutilized as Betty, a private investigator who looks like she wandered in from a Wes Anderson movie. It’s a cartoonish, baffling performance in a role that feels neither menacing nor particularly coherent. Meanwhile, Fala Chen’s Dao Ming, a casino credit broker who becomes Doyle’s companion, gets stuck in the tired “heart of gold” archetype when her character deserved more complexity.

There’s a method to the madness. Without spoilers, there is a fascinating interpretation that reframes the entire film — the close attention to visual details, sudden time leaps, unexplained absences in flashbacks, distorted reflections, and the Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts come together to suggest a far more ambitious narrative at play. If you pay attention to these breadcrumbs, the movie transforms from a standard addiction drama-slash-thriller into something more metaphysical.

Ballad of a Small Player is strange, surreal, aggressively stylized, and clearly made for a specific audience that doesn’t include everyone. It’s the kind of arthouse stake that prioritizes vibes over narrative clarity — some will find it mesmerizing and rich with hidden meaning, but others will find it frustratingly hollow. This will likely go down as a lesser work in Berger’s filmography, a somewhat baffling detour between more focused projects. Some will remember it as a film that got too greedy with technique and lost the hand it was trying to play, and others will see it as one that played a completely different game that many viewers weren’t watching. At least Farrell’s mustache remains unforgettable.

WHERE TO WATCH- Ballad of a Small Player is streaming on Netflix. You can watch the trailer on YouTube (runtime: 2:30).

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