Film / Ballad of a Small Player

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Ballad of a Small Player is a 2025 British-American crime thriller directed by Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)) based on the 2014 novel The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne. The film stars Colin Farrell, Fala Chen and Tilda Swinton.

After stealing a large sum of cash and running off, affable con man and compulsive gambler Lord Doyle (Farrell) is laying low in the gambler's paradise of Macau, spending his days and nights on the casino floors, drinking heavily and gambling what little money he has left. Struggling to keep up with his fast-rising debts, he is offered a lifeline by the mysterious Dao Ming (Chen) a casino employee with a few secrets of her own.

However, in hot pursuit is Cynthia Blithe (Swinton) a private investigator ready to confront Doyle with what he is running from. As Doyle tries to reach salvation, the confines of reality start to close in.

The film had it's world premiere at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival and was released in limited theaters throughout the UK before streaming exclusively on Netflix on October 29, 2025.

Ballad of a Small Player provides examples of:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: After being banned from all casinos in Macau, Doyle asks the casino owners to do a last gamble in baccarat where he will bet 8 million Hong Kong dollars in an All or Nothing gamble. His friend Lippett accepts the challenge and loses the bet. This leads Doyle to pay his debts with the justice and to try to make amends with Dao Ming.
• Ambiguous Situation: When Doyle is banned due to a highly improbably/suspicious run of good luck, Doyle assumes the owner is accusing him of cheating, but the owner says it is because one of his employees saw "a figure" that makes superstitious employees and customers believe Doyle is haunted by a spirit that is causing him to win. Of course, that would also be a very convenient excuse if the owner suspected Doyle was cheating but simply couldn't work out how or prove it and so didn't have grounds to formally accuse him.
• Artistic License - Gambling: Punto Banco Baccarat is not played as a contest between two players the way it was shown at the start with Doyle and Grandma or later with Lippett and Doyle. Rather bettors wager on the possible outcome of two pairs of cards, designated Punto (Player) or Banco (Banker); Which has the highest number, both tie or whether a combination of cards appear. There is no direct association between bettors and either hand so much so that its entirely acceptable to have all participants bet on the Banker's hand, including the punter himself. Though this is averted in later scenes when it is shown being played correctly in the casinos.
• Becoming the Mask: Doyle desperately wants this to happen, as he is deeply ashamed of his own identity for a number of reasons. However, his performance is so bad (as noted below under Perfect Disguise, Terrible Acting) that it's pretty clear this isn't going to happen.
• Bittersweet Ending: Doyle finally is able to quit gambling for good, but not before learning that Dao Ming committed suicide and she was haunting him as a spirit since the very first day after her death. However, by burning the remains of his winnings in the Spirits temple, he was able to pass the test Ming put on him and she will not haunt him as a hungry spirit anymore. Anyway, he goes back to the beach where he saw Dao Ming the last time, free to decide what to do with himself.
• Black Comedy: Doyle's Double Take at a man presumably jumping off the hotel to their death.
• The Casino: Doyle frequents different casinos in Macau, while the focus of the film is in The Rainbow where Dao Ming works and Grandma destroys the gamblers in baccarat games.
• Dead All Along: After Doyle manages to pay all his debts he goes to the casino Dao Ming works and is informed by Grandma that Dao Ming committed suicide the first Day of the Spirits - the day she and Doyle visited the Spirits temple - making Doyle to realize that Dao Ming was the spirit haunting him since his return from the island.
• Demonic Possession: After Doyle comes back from the island with Dao Ming's money, he starts winning big in the casinos, and, at some point, he shows an ecstatic face when winning. However, he starts suffering also from a Horror Hunger and he sees a demon face in his reflection in the bathroom. Later he is banned from the casinos after one of the owners reveal that an employee watched a ghost behind him in the surveillance videos. Is revealed later that Dao Ming was possesing him as a hungry spirit during that time. When Doyle quits gambling for good, the reflection face turned into Dao Ming's.
• Driven to Suicide: The trope is one of the main themes of the film:
  • Doyle considers suicide as an option in several times of the film, the most notorious one happens after losing the money Dao Ming gave him in the line of credit, he considers the idea while running away from the casino without paying his drinks.
  • A couple of scenes later, he is taking a drink in his hotel when he sees a man falling to his death, his wife blames Dao Ming for his death.
  • Finally Dao Ming takes her own life after leaving Doyle a group of numbers written in his hand, it is not revealed until the very end of the film, when Doyle realizes Dao was never with him in the island.
• Ethereal White Dress: The last time we see Dao Ming interacting with Doyle she is seen dressing one.
• Fake Aristocrat: Lord Doyle?, he is only an Irish man that stole money from an old woman and took on the Lord Doyle persona to avoid being detected by the authorities. Also the rival of Doyle in the All or Nothing gamble is Adrian Lippett who disguises himself as an Italian nobleman.
• Fixing the Game: Played with, when Doyle returns to gambling he win several baccarat bets in different casinos in Macau, even getting 7 consecutive wins that raises suspicions in the casino owners. While they don't find anything wrong in his gambling, they ban Doyle after the employees of one of the casinos find a ghost behind him in the videos and the owners don't want their prestige put in question by those superstitions.
• The Gambling Addict: Doyle is a compulsive gambler at the cost of his slowly dwindling amount of cash as seen with a shot of his empty wallet. This trope also applies to Grandma, who, being possessed by a Hungry Demon keeps winning and she is obsessed to keep playing. It may also apply to Lippett, who doesn't seem to be quite as bad as Doyle but is close enough to truly empathise with his situation.
• Gambler's Fallacy: Doyle professes the belief that, at some point, his luck will change as long as he has kept on losing. This proves completely wrong because he did not win by a change of luck, but by being possesed by a Hungry Demon. With that in mind, Doyle knows that he will not defeat Grandma and quits gambling. It is also implied, given that he later states the very problem with the Gambler's Fallacy, that he is actually fully aware of the way probability works (tying into his past life as a financier) and was deluding himself into believing it to keep himself from truly despairing.
• Greed: The motivation of the hungry ghosts that Dao Ming talks with Doyle in the Ghost Festival, this leads to Doyle to keep winning in the casinos to the point the owners forbide him to gamble anymore, while the hungry ghosts causes him to suffer a Horror Hunger. Grandma, the undefeated Baccarat winner, is also implied to be possessed by a hungry ghost.
• Horror Hunger: Doyle is subject to this, as he tries to eat the food he ordered in his room but it seems that nothing satisfies him and he ends puking it out, caused by the spiritual hunger of the ghost haunting him.
• Invisible to Normals: When Doyle starts to win big in the casinos, he is called by one of the casino owners revealing that his employees detected a ghost behind him on camera, leading him to forbide Doyle to keep gambling in Macao. Later is revealed that the ghost is the spirit of Dao Ming and Doyle can see her only in hallucinations.
• Ironic Hell: Comes up in a few different ways.
  • Lippett tells Doyle a joke (which he's heard before) about a gambler who dies and finds himself in a casino on an endless winning streak, and thinks he's gone to heaven only to realise he has in fact gone to hell, because a gambling addict who doesn't run a real risk of losing can't get their high from playing.
  • The Buddhist hell (naraka) in which the greedy are trapped in the form of endlessly hungry spirits with huge mouths and tiny throats who can never be sated no matter how much they try to gorge themselves is a religious version.
  • Doyle's situation after his winning streak, where he is once again rich and living in a luxury hotel with all the exquisite food he could want, but cut off from getting his gambling fix and possessed by a hungry ghost that keeps driving him to consume more and more but without ever being satisfied counts as an earthly one for him.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: There are a variety of events that could have a supernatural or a mundane explanation:
  • Doyle could simply be hallucinating Dao Ming's presence after the Night of the Hungry Ghost.
  • The Nightmare Face Doyle sees in his reflection could be brought about by stress-induced hallucinations and the self-loathing he clearly feels.
  • The Horror Hunger could be an Addiction Displacement after he gets denied his preferred vice of gambling.
  • The remarkable good luck could simply be remarkable good luck.
  • Doyle getting from the hospital to Dao Ming's floating home could have been him checking himself out of hospital and making his way there on his own, and suffering amnesia afterwards due to his generally poor health and mental state however this is definitely a stretch, and this is the event that all but proves Doyle really was the beneficiary of a miracle, but it doesn't in itself prove that the other things aren't mundane.
• Nightmare Face: During a streak of improbable good luck, Doyle's face contorts about as much as a human's realistically can, and he later sees a decidedly inhuman face in his reflection.
• Perfect Disguise, Terrible Acting: Lord Doyle is actually Brennan Reilly, who takes on the Lord Doyle persona to gives himself the role of an important people from British nobility. However, his taste on suits, his looks and his overacted manners, while being able to convince Chinese employees that he is really from the nobility, is easily caught by Cynthia Blithe and Adrian Lippett who quickly describe how bad Doyle performs his role.
• Trapped by Gambling Debts: While this is a problem for Doyle, and his desire to pay back his debts is one of the reasons he keeps gambling, it's actually a comparatively minor issue compared to him being pursued for outright theft and the fact that his nature as a gambling addict all but guarantees that he would simply get into more debt if he managed to square his current ones.