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This is a short, quick look at the plotline of Ballad of a Small Player and its slightly cryptic ending.
Colin Farrell plays “Lord” Doyle, a gambling addict living in a swanky Macau hotel while drowning in debt. He clings to the delusion that the next casino game will change everything, but meanwhile, hotel authorities threaten to call the police if he doesn’t pay up. To make matters worse, he learns that a private investigator from the UK named Blithe (Tilda Swinton) is tracking him.
Also Read: Ballad of a Small Player Review: Macau, Mania & a Gambling Addict
‘Ballad of a Small Player’ soon reveals that Doyle isn’t a lord at all, but an ordinary Irishman named Brendan Thomas Reilly, who faked his death and assumed a new identity after conning an elderly woman back in England. To avoid deportation, he must repay what he owes. Desperate for cash, he heads to a new casino and meets the kind Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who offers him credit. Even with her help, Doyle loses everything, failing spectacularly to a confident grandmother at the baccarat table, and doesn’t even manage to pay for his drinks.
The next day, Doyle crosses paths with Dao Ming again when she is attacked by a grieving woman whose husband died by suicide due to gambling debts. The widow blames Dao Ming for enabling his addiction. Doyle intervenes and saves Dao from the assault. While a shaken Dao heads home, Doyle follows her, hoping to strike a quid-pro-quo deal with her.
Dao and Doyle spend the evening walking and talking. Doyle begs for more credit, promising he will win big and split the winnings with her. She takes him to a Buddhist temple, explains the ongoing ‘Festival of Hungry Ghosts’, when people burn offerings for the dead, and tells him she plans to leave Macau. Doyle insists his luck is about to turn. The two bond over their shared flaw, ambition fuelled by greed and the belief that the next miracle is just around the corner.
“Chin up. It never lasts.”
They embrace and Doyle falls asleep outside, waking to find Dao Ming gone, but a number written on his hand. The next day Blithe, the private investigator, finds him and corners him again. Doyle takes her to a casino, unexpectedly wins a significant amount, and offers a bribe, Blithe refuses. Encouraged by his win, he returns to the casino where Dao works, plays again against the old grandmother… and loses everything.
Back at zero, Doyle approaches a friend called Adrian, who owes him money, hoping to use it to make his escape and evade any action he might have to face due to his unpaid bills and debts. Unfortunately, Adrian doesn’t bail him, leaving him desperate, hopeless, and on the verge of a breakdown. Doyle this retreats to a hotel restaurant, ordering a lavish meal he cannot afford. Sweaty and shaken, he appears close to collapse, until Dao Ming arrives, moments before Doyle faints.
He wakes on an island in Dao Ming’s home, away from the mainland. She explains she took him from urgent care and he had been unconscious for two days. They grow closer, and Dao tells him about running away from home to build a better life, sending money back to her mother, who returned it every time. After spending another night together, Doyle wakes to find Dao missing. He finds a locked shed, unlocks it using the number from his hand, and discovers stacks of cash, Dao’s life savings. He steals it and rushes back to his casinos.
This time Doyle’s luck is astonishing. He goes on an unstoppable winning streak in the climactic half hour of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’, eventually becoming a whispered legend in casino circles. Some staff claim a ghost is assisting him, one man even insists a spirit was visible above Doyle on CCTV. Doyle dismisses the superstition but is denied access to the footage. Not just that, he is also banned from playing in any of the casinos in Macau due to the superstitious belief.
Though now wealthy beyond need, Doyle cannot stop gambling. He phones a casino owner and demands one final high-stakes bet: 8 million Hong Kong dollars on a single hand of baccarat. If he loses, it proves there is no ghost; if he wins, he vows to leave Macau forever.
So for the final act of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ Doyle stakes everything on the final game of baccarat, facing Adrian, the man who once betrayed him, now disguised as Prince Lorenzo of Monte Carlo to add spectacle to the high-stakes showdown. The room is packed, the tension electric. Against all expectation, Doyle wins again, sealing an unbelievable victory.
Jubilant over the victory, Doyle heads to another casino with two large bags of cash, looking for Dao Ming but instead encounters the same formidable grandmother he had previously lost to. She challenges him again, offering an irresistible wager. Doyle begins to sweat, his addiction clawing its way to the surface, but for the first time he resists the pull of the table. He steps back, declines the offer, and instead asks to see Dao Ming.
To his shock, he is told Dao Ming has been dead for days. Stunned, he rushes to her flat, it is empty, confirming the truth. On the last day of the ‘Festival of Hungry Ghosts’, he returns to the temple and burns the cash as an offering to her spirit. The final minute of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ shows him looking at festival fireworks, with an exhausted but relieves expression, with no regret over the burnt money. He seems to be finally at peace.
Ending of Ballad of a Small Player Explained
The final twist strongly suggests that Dao Ming died the night she witnessed her client leap to his death. Consumed by guilt for enabling destructive gambling habits, she likely ended her own life. What Doyle experienced on the island was either hallucination born from collapse, or Dao Ming’s ghost guiding him toward redemption.
She saved him in death the way she could not in life, leading him to the island and giving him her savings so he could escape the self-destruction she could not. Doyle’s miraculous winning streak becomes a metaphor: proof that winning does not fix emptiness. Surrounded by stacks of cash, he remains anxious, lost, and broken.
Burning the money serves as both tribute and cleansing. He finally honors his promise, and symbolically severs the cycle of addiction. The climax of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ makes clear that Doyle’s luck never came from talent or fate, but from the ghost of a woman crushed by the same addiction he glorified. Her spirit pushed him toward fortune only so he could see its futility. When the cash turns to ashes, Doyle confronts the truth: no amount of winning can buy back a soul already lost.
The supernatural elements in ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ serve only as a mirror. Whether Dao Ming’s ghost was real or only conscience manifest, the message remains the same: wealth without purpose is rot, and a life ruled by desire devours itself. The ending offers rare hope in a genre steeped in despair, that even the smallest player can rewrite the final hand. I do think the ghost existed, or well, that’s the simplest, and entertaining explanation. Which is why we have the whole ‘Festival of Hungry Ghosts’ motif in the movie too.
Of course, there are many different ways to interpret the themes and final twists of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’. If your takeaway was completely different, share your thoughts in the comments.
In fact, here’s my wild take: when Doyle collapses at the hotel, I actually thought he died and that the rest of the tale unfolds in gamblers hell. That everything happening isn’t taking place in the real world at all. So I thought the ending twist of ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ would be that his winning streak was taking place in the afterlife, Doyle just doesn’t know it yet!
‘Ballad of a Small Player’ is on Netflix.
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