A One Mann’s Movies review of “Ballad of a Small Player” (From the 2025 London Film Festival). (2025, 5*, ’15’).
I really can’t see how I can avoid it. But my Top 10 for 2025 looks destined to have TWO films with the title “Ballad of” in the title (with the other of course being “The Ballad of Wallace Island“). Because I found “Ballad of a Small Player”, Edward Berger’s follow-up to “Conclave“, to be absolutely FANTASTIC.
However, it seems to have an IMDB rating of just 6/10 and fellow press and industry people around me in the screening seemed to have very mixed views about it. Reading other critic reviews this evening, I see a lot of people calling it “over-directed” and “hollow”. I don’t care! I just had a great time in the cinema with this one, so I’m sticking to my 5 stars and would even give it some of the Oscars next March! Yah, Boo, Sucks!
One Mann’s Movies Rating:
Plot:
Lord Doyle is living the high life in a Macao casino. But in the midst of a big losing streak, he needs his “lucky gloves” to help turn his fortunes around, else he won’t be able to afford his rapidly increasing room service bill.
Certification:
UK: NR; US: NR. (The film has not yet been rated by the BBFC but I would expect it to be a 15 for strong language.)
Talent:
Starring: Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Alex Jennings, Fala Chen, Deanie lp, Alan K. Chang.
Directed by: Edward Berger.
Written by: Rowan Joffe. (From the novel by Lawrence Osborne.)
Running Time: 1h 41m.
Summary:
Positives:
- Colin Farrell delivers a brilliantly deranged performance as Lord Doyle.
- The cinematography is magnificent, with Macau becoming another character in the movie. I also loved some of the extreme close-us of a sweaty Farrell!
- I agree that the film might be somewhat hollow if it were not for the mid-film diversion into a completely different genre that I loved.
- For once, I really liked Volker Bertelmann’s bombastic and intrusive score
Negatives:
- I think I understand what the ending ‘sacrifice’ was trying to signify, but it wasn’t sufficiently well conveyed.
- A more nuanced ending with alternative options might have worked better (see Spoiler Section).
Full Review of “Ballad of a Small Player”:
Vegas… but not.
I loved the opening of the film which tells you so much without a single word… well, one…. “Fuck!”.
In the opening shot, the camera glides over Las Vegas showing the lights and the glitz of the faux-architecture… but, unsettlingly, the chatter from the game show you can hear on the TV is in Cantonese. And then the reveal, we are actually in Macau, the ex-Portuguese colony near Hong Kong… which might as well be called (and probably is called) the Vegas of the East.
Aside from those amazing visuals of Bond arriving by boat in “Casino Royale”, I can’t remember Macau being featured prominently in any recent Western films. So, the football score is Vegas: 2,878, Macau: 2. But Macau is one of the stars of the film, brought vividly to life by cinematographer James Friend, DP on Berger’s Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front“.
Friend would be my definite pick for an Oscar nomination for this if not a win. The colour palette beautifully reflects the ever-changing moods of the Macau weather with the internal casino shots being a vivid assault on the eyes.
Back to that opening.
But I digress. That opening shows Lord Doyle as the ultimate hedonist, with champagne bottles and left-over meals scattered all around his room, the “Do Not Disturb” on the door making for a nasty surprise for the maid service when they finally do get access. We can tell that Doyle has been there for a very long time already and that his room service bill is many multiples of what Kevin McAllister rang up in “Home Alone 2”! (We learn it is HKD 350,000!) But we also know, from that one word opening, that his issues are not solely confined to a blazing hangover. Doyle is looking into a financial abyss of his own making.
Berger sets our perspective on Doyle’s despair by a dizzying Dutch-angle shot as he descends an escalator into the casino. Doyle knows he’s on borrowed time as he shields his face from the desk staff. It is only the friendly bellman Kai (Alan K. Chang) who seems to have faith in Doyle, and points him at the “Rainbow Casino” where he says “you might get credit there”.
A Grandma with a ghost on her back.
At the Rainbow we meet three important characters. There’s dodgy money-lender Dao Ming (Fala Chen) that Doyle feels an immediate affinity to; there’s his Baccarat nemesis ‘Grandma’ (Deanie lp) who seems to magically draw a nine for every hand; and then there is a badly-dressed biddy called Blyth who is intent on taking his picture.
Of course, there is more to this story. Blyth is there on a mission and fails to be won over by Doyle’s usual patter: “let’s have dinner and a dance and perhaps we can come to some arrangement”.
A ghostly tale in general.
Lord Doyle himself is described by the locals as a “qwai lo” – a “foreign ghost cloaked in invisibility”. And it’s yet another reference to the supernatural elements of this story that I wasn’t prepared for. There is a pervasive atmosphere of suicidal thoughts, driven by gambling losses. Doyle – who, according to a Chinese saying from con-man Adrian Lippett (a wonderfully smarmy Alex Jennings) is “Dead to Shame” – fiercely declares himself to be immune: “I’ve always seen suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem”. But the walls are closing in on him too.
A salvation of sorts comes to him from Dao Ming who latches onto Doyle as a fellow “lost soul”. But she is the first to see through Doyle’s smokescreens: she points out that his yellow-leather lucky gloves – “Savile Row’s finest” – were actually made in China. She explains to him about the Buddhist festival ongoing celebrating “The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts” – a form of the Buddhist hell or “naraka” – where the spirits are in torment from perpetual greed, never being fulfilled with ‘enough’.
Dark waters
We enter some dark but increasingly mysterious waters in the third reel of the film and I think the film is open to different interpretations. I’ll add more in a “Spoiler Section” below the trailer, since this is a film best seen cold.
The music
Volker Bertelmann’s scores have been a few of my negative points, in both “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave“: I found them generally intrusive and over-bearing. Here, they were equally intrusive and sometimes very very loud. But I didn’t have a problem with it! It seemed to suit the mood of the film better. The score included a very exciting piece of music played during a chaotic chase through the hotel and a laundry room.
Not a good gambling message.
One thing the film doesn’t do (if you take it at face value) is demonise gambling. I was sat next to a lovely lady in the screening, who works in the industry (development funding). She is of Chinese ethnicity and took very much against the film for its portrayal of gambling addiction as being “survivable”. It is illegal to gamble in China, so of course the Chinese flock to the city on the boat from Hong Kong. Polly recounted how gambling had caused people she knows to lose everything on the tables. I agree… it’s not a good message.
Summary Thoughts:
As I’ve been writing this, and particularly given the feedback from my LFF friend, I’ve questioned my 5 star rating a bit. It does have some flaws. But I will stick with it since it is the way I felt in my gut throughout the film. I had a great time in the cinema! But the lively discussion around this one at the LFF suggests it is a real Marmite movie, with strong opinions on either side! Love a good bit of argument!
Tickets for the remaining London Film Festival showing on 12th October are currently sold out, but here is the booking web site to check for returns or other showings. But you don’t have to wait long for it: it will be in cinemas from October 15th and then streaming on Netflix from October 29, 2025.
Where to watch?
Trailer:
The trailer for the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1B5W55TFyo.
Spoiler Section:
Don’t read past this point if you’ve not seen the movie.
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NO, SERIOUSLY!
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Is Hell a Casino where you feel you can never lose?
The supernatural aspect of this film comes from the fact that Dao Ming (Fala Chen) died the night she spent on the beach with Doyle. The houseboat scenes and the finding of her submerged fortune is thus not readily explained. Neither is whether Dao Ming is the ‘ghost on his back’ as he performs the astonishingly ‘lucky’ run that amasses his fortune… but that is certainly the assumption I came to.
The constant creaking of the house-boat is a lovely audio reminder to him of the presence of her spirit and of the dangers of greed. And my assumption was that his burning of the money as the effigy of the ‘Hungry Ghost’ was an act that was to effectively to set her soul free from Narada. (Did he actually burn ALL of the money… I think we only actually saw him burn one of the two bags?).
There is another potential analysis of the film where Doyle is the one who might have died from the heart attack in the Hong Kong bar, and he is living this life of winning and losing in purgatory (which is an idea mentioned in the film). I don’t think this is the way Rowan Joffe has played it, but it might have been better if the writing had been a bit more nuanced and open to debate in this regard.
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