In Edward Berger’s neon nightmare Ballad of a Small Participant, Colin Farrell is a sweat-soaked specter haunting the casinos of Macau. The regulars he encounters usually seek advice from him as a “Gweilo,” Cantonese for “Ghost Man,” relevant to him in some ways. First, the playing addict is posing as Lord Doyle, although it is rapidly identified to him that Doyle is not even a fancy identify.
As an alternative, it seems that the ex-pat is definitely a person named Reilly, a con man on the run. Based mostly on the novel of the identical identify by Lawrence Osborne, Berger’s newest is a wierd beast of a movie, manic and infrequently directionless, making some unusual selections, a script and movie as erratic as its central character. Berger’s attractive path, Volker Bertelmann’s throbbing horns-and-strings rating, and Farrell’s dedicated efficiency, Ballad of a Small Participant barely manages to carry all of it collectively, although.
Ballad of a Small participant might chunk off greater than it may possibly chew, and it struggles to carry all of its threads collectively because it careens in direction of a feverish conclusion that’s as delirious as Farrell’s character, but it surely’s nonetheless an entertaining experience.
Ballad Of A Small Participant Is A Flawed Movie That I Could not Look Away From
The primary phrase out of Farrell’s mouth within the movie is a belabored “f*ck” — he is clearly hungover, his palatial lodge room affected by empty champagne bottles, soiled garments, and overturned furnishings. The Macau sunshine is as piercing because the migraine Reilly certainly has and, if he may hear the music that accompanies the gorgeously debaucherous scene, it will certainly worsen.
Berger offers the proceedings a way of grandiosity in the identical approach he imbued Conclave‘s papal drama with a way of ever-growing stakes. Macau is shot like a ghost city, the casinos and backdoor playing rooms huge and hole, the greed and compulsion of the haunting figures that populate them felt by the display screen.
That is all supported by Farrell’s gonzo efficiency, someplace in between the hallucinogenic panic of Worry and Loathing in Las Vegas and the live-wire nervousness of Uncut Gems. The one downside is that Farrell hardly ever, if ever, leaves this register for a second of respite. Berger’s movie is working at this degree for its 100-minute runtime, which may show exhausting and undermine any type of improvement the story gestures at.
That story additionally entails two different figures — Tilda Swinton’s Cynthia Blithe, a delightfully kooky personal investigator with a to-die-for pair of glasses scorching on Reilly’s tail, and Fala Chen’s Dao Ming, a mortgage shark who will get concerned with the swindler simply as he is about to spiral uncontrolled. Each are type of haunting Reilly themselves, representing potential outcomes for him relying on which path he chooses.
In fact, Reilly, being the playing addict he’s, is satisfied that his subsequent fortunate break is true on the horizon. As he careens from on line casino to on line casino, shedding each step of the best way, Berger forces us to behold the self-destruction at play right here. It is not nice to look at, with lots of Farrell’s greatest scenes additionally being deeply uncomfortable portraits of a person on the verge of shedding all of it, together with his thoughts.
For what Ballad of a Small Participant lacks in cohesiveness, it makes up for it in pure type. Berger’s missteps listed here are far more forgivable due to this, although when the movie crescendos with a predictable twist, it may possibly’t assist however really feel as if it has misplaced the plot. Watching a personality make horrible selections for practically two hours is a troublesome ask of audiences and, although Ballad of a Small Participant would not absolutely justify its chaos, it is an entertaining thrill experience nonetheless.
Ballad of a Small Participant screened on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition. Netflix will launch the movie in restricted theaters on October 15 earlier than it’s accessible to stream on October 29.
Ballad of a Small Participant
6/10
- Launch Date
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October 15, 2025
- Runtime
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101 Minutes
- Director
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Edward Berger
- Writers
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Rowan Joffe, Lawrence Osborne
- Producers
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Matthew James Wilkinson, Elle Gibbons, Mike Goodridge