Colin Farrell Goes All In in Netflix’s Ballad of a Small Player Trailer From the Conclave Director
Colin Farrell goes all-in as the first full-length trailer for Ballad of a Small Player lands, teasing Edward Berger’s Netflix drama with Tilda Swinton and arriving on the streamer later this month.
Netflix just dropped the first full trailer for Ballad of a Small Player, and it is very much a neon-soaked, hangover-in-Macau mood piece. Edward Berger going from All Quiet on the Western Front to a hazy gambling noir with Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton is not the pivot I had on my bingo card, but here we are.
The setup
Farrell plays Lord Doyle, a guy hiding out in Macau and doing exactly what you should not do when you are hiding out: living on casino floors, drinking too much, and burning through what little cash he has left. His debts are climbing fast, a mysterious casino employee named Dao Ming (Fala Chen) offers him a lifeline, and a private investigator, Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton), is closing in with the receipts on whatever he ran from in the first place. The trailer hints that as Doyle claws for a way out, reality itself starts to buckle a bit — this is not just chips and whiskey; this is guilt and ghosts.
Who is who
- Director: Edward Berger (2024's Conclave; 2022's All Quiet on the Western Front)
- Based on: The 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne
- Colin Farrell as Lord Doyle, a compulsive gambler on the run in Macau
- Tilda Swinton as Cynthia Blithe, a relentless private investigator
- Fala Chen as Dao Ming, a casino insider with her own secrets
- Also starring: Deanie Ip and Alex Jennings
- Where to watch: Netflix
- Release date: October 29, 2025
Farrell on Doyle
"Lord Doyle is somebody who is trying to escape his past. I do not think he has any idea, really, how much his past is carried in every cell of his being. He is, like most addicts, somewhat narcissistic, and can only see the world through the lens of his own needs and his own desires."
That tracks with what the trailer is selling: a man convinced the next bet will fix the last one, even as the walls close in.
Why this is interesting
Berger doing humid, high-gloss moral limbo after the precision horror of war is a very inside-baseball flex, and pairing Farrell and Swinton for a cat-and-mouse in Macau feels like the kind of grown-up, character-first thriller Netflix does not greenlight every day. If the movie leans into the book's slippery sense of reality the way the footage suggests, expect less Rain Man math and more fever-dream consequences.