Ballad of a Small Player: Colin Farrell Is the Ghost in the Casino in this Gambling Thriller

By Chris Knight

Rating: B+

The world needs more ghost stories that aren’t jump-scary. And Ballad of a Small Player is just such a beast.

Colin Farrell stars as Riley, though he passes himself off as minor nobility by using the name Lord Doyle. He’s a compulsive and not very successful gambler who is wafting around the gaming dens of Macau, trying to pull himself out of debt in the only way he knows how.

As an Irishman in East Asia, Lord Doyle is what the Chinese call a “gwai lo,” or white foreigner; literally a “ghost man.” This makes him more visible than many of the locals, but also lends him an air of eerie mystery, especially during the Zhongyuan Festival, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the barrier between this world and the next is said to be particularly thin.

One person not taken in by his sublimity or his phoney foreign credentials is Cynthia Blithe, a private investigator in the employ of those back home whom “Lord Doyle” has swindled.

It’s another of Swinton’s singular performances — she has recently played a post-apocalyptic survivor in The End; a woman obsessed with strange, subliminal sounds in Memoria; and the voice of Death itself in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. I wish there were more of her in this one, but it’s Farrell’s show, and she remains no more than an eccentric bit of fringe.

Far more central to Lord Doyle’s story is Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a mysterious employee of one of the casinos he frequents. She takes a liking to this hard-luck case, probably to her own professional detriment, and tries to help him out of his troubles.

What follows is a weird, twisted tale, sometimes tricky to comprehend, but follow the amount of sweat on Farrell’s brow, and the way he noisily mangles his cards (great foley!) as he creases them to peek at their value, and you’ll be on the right track.

Lord Doyle’s game of choice is (not to be confused with the city) Macao, a Baccarat-like card game of almost maddening simplicity. I thought I knew Baccarat from a lifetime of Ian Fleming novels and James Bond movies, but this new wrinkle threw me for a loop!

Doyle gets some dubious gaming advice from a fellow “ghost man” — Alex Jennings in what amounts to an extended cameo — who tells him that winning will kill him faster than losing, and that the trick is not to be free of shame, but dead to it. These smarmy insights sound almost supernatural, and seem even more so when Dao Ming disappears, leaving her good luck behind like the grin of a Cheshire Cat.

Ballad of a Small Player is the latest from director Edward Berger, who last year took the papal thriller Conclave to the Oscars with eight nominations, and whose previous film, 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, won four including Best International Feature.

This one is less Oscar-baity, although Farrell turns in his usual stellar work — hard to believe this is the same guy who played a very different character in The Banshees of Inisherin. Berger, in his introduction to the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, called it a love letter to the star, although it feels more like hate given what his character has to go through.

Still, it’s a fascinating psychological thriller, a ghost story with (as Dickens would say) more gravy than grave in its construction. Tell me it’s not and my reply will be simple. Wanna bet?

Ballad of a Small Player. Directed by Edward Berger. Starring Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, and Tilda Swinton. In theatres October 17 and on Netflix October 29.