Ballad of a Small Player
First screened and reviewed in November 2025
Director: Edward Berger. Cast: Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Tilda Swinton, Deanie Ip, Mark Jennings, Anthony Wong, James Tobin, Alan K. Chang, Ashley Lin. Screenplay: Rowan Joffe (based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne). In Brief:
I wanted Berger to shake things up, but not with tacky, over-styled character/mood piece. A big bet lost.
VOR:②
I can give credit for not playing things safe, but when you peel away an overripe rind, the exoticist addiction drama inside feels old and rotten.
That title is very close to a self-own by Edward Berger, a small filmmaker who has not shown his skills or sensibility to any better advantage by making a "smaller" film than Conclave or Western Front. What might have been a chance to sharpen up framing and cutting suffers from Berger's constant urge toward self-importance and heavy-footed show-offery. The edit is often chaotic and just as often flat (ooh, yet another cut to a drably framed master shot!), and the lighting and color grading are gaudily overdone in a way that would prompt taking an over-eager film student aside. Visually, but not just visually, Small Player feels like a misbegotten fusion of Ocean's Thirteen, Steven Soderbergh's seizing on the casino as a venue for heightened color and luminosity, deliberately out of proportion to story content, and of Uncut Gems, with dreams of comparably sick-stomach momentum but also similar uncertainties about whether the central character is an antihero or just a shit.
Berger misses Soderbergh's elegant and merry abstraction (not that it would have been appropriate anyway), and his film can't settle on a POV on Colin Farrell's Lord Doyle. As a result, he goads that persistently obliging actor to follow the lead of sound and image and just go steadily bigger, sometimes unsteadily bigger, without always going deeper. The plot's stakes are both too inflated and too low, the bond(?) between Farrell's and Fala Chen's characters a crazy extrapolation on the slimmest of bases, and the ending pretty ludicrous.
All the while, composer of the moment Volker Bertelmann admirably tries to test out different tones or tempos than his usual missile launches of short, sharp, electronic darkness, but his experiment doesn't work out much better than Berger's. The score sounds like someone enticed Max von Sydow's character from Hannah and Her Sisters to try his first spin on a dance floor, perhaps at one of those solemn weddings that no one's quite sure should be happening. It's a grim affair despite its welcome aspiration toward energy, and all the more so in its feints at conjuring Macao. I fear someone in production might even have used the word "Asiatic" in their prompt.
But, if you want to feel immersed in a sweaty, slimy character grabbing at the last limb of quasi-decency as he plunges into the abyss, the film at least manages that, with the most occasional flashes of poignancy. And, it's short! Grade:D+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
