To know the value of something, you can’t just win it — you have to earn it. That’s a lesson that Edward Berger, cinema’s new premier middlebrow bombast merchant, should have learnt before taking on Ballad of a Small Player. But the success of his previous two, Oscar-winning movies, All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, was unearnt and undeserved, so here we have a brash, shallow, wholly unconvincing movie from a director swinging big on a losing hand. Messy and cartoonish yet striving for depth and profundity, this is a hopelessly heavy-handed movie that lands with an even heavier thud.
Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) is a high-stakes gambler full of ambition, cockiness, and nerve, but empty of pocket. He’s living a life of luxury in Macau that he’s on the brink of squandering, as his losing streak catches up with him — hotel bills rocketing, casinos barring him, and a private investigator from England, Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton), now on his trail. But any gambler knows that the brink of a life-changing loss could also be the brink of a life-changing win, and an encounter with a fellow lost soul, Dao Ming (Fala Chen), could turn the former into the latter for Doyle.
Ballad of a Small Player tells a stylized story, built from well-worn tropes, and Rowan Joffe’s screenplay doesn’t diminish this aspect. But Berger’s direction does. He tries to engineer a modern kind of sincerity that chafes against the classical nature of the story and script. Quips and maxims spoken in a naturalistic cadence become drained of all their import, left to sound pat and corny. Meaningful narrative developments become easy conveniences, building a fantasy without root in any recognizable reality. The movie wants to be all things at all times — bold yet familiar, daring yet cliché, stylized yet sincere — but there’s no identifiable attempt to find a method of merging these elements. It’s wild and wayward, and without any innovation this waywardness becomes merely coarse and irritating.
It’s all stylistic exaggeration with precious little depth or subtlety, every blusterous tic a stab at creating mood or tone, rarely actually revealing or reflecting something within the narrative or characters, all extraneous artifice, no authenticity. It becomes extremely difficult to generate any concern for Doyle and his predicament, as Berger tries to elicit genuine emotional responses from non-genuine stimuli — James Friend’s garish neon-drenched cinematography and Volker Bertelmann’s brutish orchestral score doing the most to the least effect. From very early on, Ballad of the Small Player has already become a movie of empty braggadocio and pointless grandiosity, full of banal, inexpressive compositions designed to appeal to the most undiscerning aesthetes. Berger is a filmmaker second, a wannabe bourgeois imagemaker first; he manufactures gravitas and meaning without truly developing them nor understanding how to integrate them into his style, and so every image feels hollow, every line of dialogue pompous.
The result is a posey, presumptive movie of ersatz parts that consistently fail to coalesce into a single persuasive statement, either artistically or narratively. Farrell is too earnest and casual for the role, while Swinton is too broad, dressed like a character from a children’s TV show. Doyle’s sporadic narration is employed to tell us things Berger doesn’t bother to show: he’s described as a man “cloaked in invisibility,” a quality never made apparent by the diegetic action. And the Westerner-adrift-in-an-exotic-locale story is, in 2025, horribly old-fashioned, with none of Berger’s loud, hysterical stylistic extravagances doing anything to update the formula. In effect, they are just strikes at winning value on a desperate chance, rather than earning it on intelligence and filmmaking acumen.
DIRECTOR: Edward Berger; CAST: Collin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen, Alex Jennings; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: October 17; STREAMING: October 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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