'Ballad of a Small Player' movie review: A stylish gamble that falls short

Something is arresting about the glitter and glamour of Macau. Perhaps it is the vacuousness of it all. 'Ballad of a Small Player' unfolds just like the city it is set in — it is hypnotic but rather hollow. 

Directed by Edward Berger ('All Quiet on the Western Front', 2022), this genre-fluid casino drama is adapted from Lawrence Osborne's novel. It is a moody, unsettling take on greed, loneliness, luck and love. 

Colin Farrell, who plays the dodgy Lord Doyle, a British gambler who is down to his last dime, carries the entire film on his drooping shoulders. His performance makes you hold on, even if the film often feels like a rattling, speeding bus that's going nowhere. Farrell is charming and ruinous. The camera lovingly traces his sweaty desperation even as he stuffs himself with caviar and lobster, when deep in debt and bereft of ideas. But his mysterious 'affair' with Dao Ming (Fala Chen) does not quite register; it just leaves you more muddled than before.

The entire movie is structured like a fever dream... the camera drunkenly zooms up and down snazzy skyscrapers, and spans a city celebrating a week for ghosts with fireworks and effigies aflame. But it seems Berger was so intent on the atmospherics that he neglected the movie's emotional heft and plot. At best, this is a tale that deliberately self-destructs to capture the melancholy and gloom of self-destruction. But the director, just like Lord Doyle, has overplayed his hand, alas.