Ballad of a Small Player review – Colin Farrell seeks redemption in Edward Berger’s high

T he vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing if static and overwrought psychological drama-thriller; it is about a desperate chancer and gambling addict, faced with the metaphysical crisis of renewing or annulling his existence by staking everything on a single bet. Screenwriter Rowan Joffe adapts the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, whose title is ironic. He would not have these problems if he really was a small player. He is a big player and a big loser, although his smallness comes through in other ways.

Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself “Lord Doyle”, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; he is a despised “gweilo” or foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy guy with an outrag