‘Ballad of A Small Player’ Ending Explained: What Happens in the Colin Farrell Netflix Movie?

While there are plenty of spooky movies to watch this Halloweekend, don’t let Ballad of a Small Player—the new Colin Farrell Netflix movie that began streaming today—slip past your radar. It’s not spooky, exactly, but it is a ghost story.

Ballad of a Small Player comes from director Edward Berger, who is fresh off an Oscar nomination for his 2024 film, Conclave. The screenplay, written by Rowan Joffé, is based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne. Colin Farrell stars as Lord Freddy Doyle, a gambling addict who has run out of luck, and is up to his eyeballs in debt. He has only days to turn his luck around… or find another way out.

Also starring Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings, and Tilda Swinton, Ballad of a Small Player has not enchanted critics in the same way that Berger’s previous film, Conclave, did. But perhaps the film will find its audience on Netflix. For those who do watch the movie til the end, you might find yourself confused by the Ballad of a Small Player ending. Don’t worry, Decider is here to help. Read on for a breakdown of the Ballad of a Small Player plot summary and the Ballad of a Small Player ending explained.

Ballad of a Small Player plot summary:

We meet Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) in his trashed luxury hotel room in Macau, a special administrative region of China that is home to one of the largest gambling industries in the world. Lord Doyle has, apparently, blown all his gambling winnings on champagne and gourmet food, and is down to one last roll of cash. He tries to sneak out to the casino, but is stopped by the hotel, who informs him he owes over $350,000. If he doesn’t pay what he owes in three days, they will call the authorities.

So, Lord Doyle goes to one of the only casinos left in town that will still let him play on credit, the Rainbow Room. He gambles away the rest of his money playing his favorite card game, baccarat. The rules: Players get two cards. Aces are worth one; two through nine are face value; ten, Jack, Queen and King are worth zero. If either hand has an eight or nine, the game ends, and the highest total wins. If there is no eight or nine on the table, a third card is drawn, and the hand closest to nine (the highest possible score, as only the last number in a score counts) wins.

Lord Doyle loses all his money to his opponent, a mean old woman the club calls “Grandma.” One of the club’s workers, Dao Ming (Fala Chen), offers to let Doyle keep playing on credit, meaning she will lend him money that he will have to pay back with interest. Doyle accepts, but then leaves without paying his bar tab.

The next evening, Doyle witnesses a man take his life by jumping off the roof of the hotel. The man’s distraught wife blames Dao Ming for his death—because Dao Ming lent the man credit, she enabled his gambling addiction, until he lost so much that he saw no other way out.

This hits Dao Ming hard, and she flees the scene. Doyle, wanting to comfort her, follows Dao Ming home. Doyle and Dao Ming spend a strange night together. At her apartment, Doyle finds a post card for Lamma Island. They end up at the Festival of the Hungry Ghost, which Dao Ming explains is the week-long festival. At the end of the week, people will burn offerings to the dead.

They end up on a bench together near the shore. Dao Ming grieves all the harm she has inflicted on the gambling addicts of the world, and grieves for herself, too—now that this man has killed himself, she is responsible for his debt to the casino. Doyle insists to Dao Ming that he is different. He insists he knows he is about to win it big, and makes a promise to pay off all of Dao Ming’s debts when he does. Even though Dao Ming doesn’t really believe him, she allows them both to indulge in the fantasy for the night.

Doyle wakes on the bench alone, with a number written in ink on his hand. Invigorated by his promise to Dao Ming, he returns to the casino refreshed and ready to win money. Before he can, he’s confronted by a private detective who goes by Betty (Tilda Swinton), who has tracked him down for stealing from an elderly person. Realizing he’s caught, Doyle drops his posh accent and slips into his natural, Irish, working-class accent. He’s not a lord at all. He’s a petty thief from Ireland named Brendan Thomas Reilly.

Doyle/Reilly manages to win a decent chunk of money at baccarat that day, and tries to pay the private detective—whose real name in Cynthia—off. Cynthia refuses the money, so Reilly tries a different tactic: He asks her to dance. This doesn’t work either. She tells him he has 24 hours to pay back the money he stole, or she’ll call the authorities to have him deported. So, now he owes two people money.

Doyle wants to pay Dao Ming like he promised, but can’t resist the call of gambling. Doyle blows his winnings on more gambling, and once again loses everything. In despair, he spends a day binge-drinking champagne and binge-eating gourmet food that he doesn’t even like in the hotel bar, ordering more and more and more, to delay the inevitable arrival of the bill that he can’t pay. When he’s drunk and sick to his stomach, Dao Ming appears to him in the bar. Doyle, feverish, collapses and passes out.

When Doyle wakes up, he’s on Lamma Island in Hong Kong with Dao Ming. She tells him she brought him there from urgent care. She nurses him back to health, allowing him to detox his gambling addiction in the same way a heroin addict might, complete with withdrawal symptoms. Dao Ming tells Doyle her story: She ran away from home at a young age, causing her father to die of a broken heart. She worked for years and earned a chunk of savings that she sent to her mother in hopes she would forgive her. But her mother sent the money back.

Doyle wakes up one morning on Lamma Island alone. He waits all day for Dao Ming to return, but she doesn’t. While exploring, Doyle finds a shed locked with a combination lock. He uses the number written on his hand to unlock it, and inside finds a huge bag of cash—the money that Dao Ming saved, that her mother sent back. While Doyle tries to resist, he simply can’t. He steals the money and returns to Macau to gamble. This time, he wins big.

Doyle pays off his hotel debt, and keeps on winning. But the hotel is suspicious of his non-stop winning. They believe Doyle has a ghost attached to him, causing him to win. They ban him from gambling at any of the casinos in town.

Cut off from gambling, Doyle goes back to binge-eating gourmet food. But nothings seems to satiate his hunger. He’s haunted by visions of the hungry ghost, which Dao Ming told him are spirits with thin necks, big mouths and empty stomachs, driven by greed. Needing desperately to gamble, Doyle convinces the hotel to let him play one last game of baccarat. He will bet everything on a single hand. If he wins, he promises to leave Macau for ever, and if he loses, it will prove there is no ghost. The hotel agrees.

Before he can play, private detective Cynthia confronts Doyle/Reilly for the money he stole. He swears to her he’s about to win the biggest pot anyone’s ever won from a hand of baccarat, and when he does, he will give her a life-changing sum of money. Cynthia, like Reilly, came from a working class background, and she can’t resist this offer.

So Doyle plays. And he wins. He pays off all his debts, and keeps his promise to Cynthia, paying her a life-changing amount of money. She decides to take him up on his offer to dance. A triumphant Doyle marches over to the Rainbow Room to give the rest of his winnings to Dao Ming. There, he is tempted by Grandma to play another round of baccarat. But he refuses, claiming he will never gamble again. He just wants to pay back Dao Ming for the money he promised and the money he stole. But Grandma tells Doyle that’s impossible, because Dao Ming is dead. She drowned herself on the first night of the Hungry Ghost Festival.

Ballad of a Small Player ending explained:

Dao Ming died the night she left Doyle on the bench. She wrote her lock combination on Doyle’s hand, and then drowned herself. We re-see flashes of the scenes for Lamma Island, and see that Doyle was alone the whole time.

While some might interpret this to mean that Doyle simply hallucinated Dao Ming taking him to Lamma Island, in my opinion, Ballad of a Small Player is a universe where ghosts are real, and therefore the spirit of Dao Ming visited Doyle as a ghost, which no one else could see besides him.

Dao Ming wanted to find redemption for failing her parents and failing the gambling addict she enabled. So, her spirit wants to save this particular gambling addict from himself. In an interview for the Ballad production notes, director Edward Berger confirmed the film has “a wonderful supernatural element to it.” So, Dao Ming’s spirit tried to heal Doyle of his addiction, but he still went back to his old ways.

Doyle is devastated that he can’t pay Dao Ming the money he owes… until he realizes that, actually, there is a way. It’s now the last day of the Hungry Ghost Festival, which is the day that people make offerings to the dead. Doyle brings all of his winnings to the temple, and burns it, as an offering to Dao Ming. He returns to the bench where he last saw Dao Ming alive, where he watches the fireworks from the festival with a smile. (There’s also a mid-credits scene in which Farrell and Swinton tear it up on the dance floor, which is fun, but doesn’t have any significant meaning to the plot, in my opinion.)

So what does it mean? I take the final scene as an indication that Doyle finally does heal at the end of the movie, in the way Dao Ming’s spirit hoped he would heal on Lamma Island. If Doyle had kept the money, he would have inevitably gotten sucked back into the gambling addiction. But instead, he found a way to “give” the money back to Dao Ming, by burning it. He finally found a way to free himself from his generational-inherited shame. It wasn’t winning a bunch of money that freed him. It wasn’t creating an entirely new, posh identity. It was facing his truth (which he does when he is his true authentic self, Reilly, with Tilda Swinton) and walking away from the money he earned with dishonesty (which he does by burning his winnings).

But hey, that’s just my interpretation of the movie. If you have a different take, let me know in the comments.