'Ballad of a Small Player' doubles down on style

Colin Farrell's Netflix drama is flashy but empty.

No, Colin Farrell is not playing Young Thurston Howell III in a “Gilligan’s Island” prequel. (Netflix)

After making a film set in a papal conclave, director Edward Berger has made a movie set in a place that’s even more cloistered and cut off from the outside world: a casino.

The Netflix original movie “Ballad of a Small Player” is a bit of a shock to the system for fans of the austere, intense “Conclave.” Immersing us in the neon-drenched universe of a high-end casino in Macau, “Ballad” is a hyper-stylized, disorienting film awash in artificial blues, pinks and greens, full of showy camera movies and a bombastic score by Volker Bertelmann.

I don’t think there’s a whole lot there underneath the flash and the dazzle, aside from a go-for-broke lead performance by Colin Farrell. But as we stagger, dazed, into the light after the movie is over, it definitely feels like we experienced something.

Farrell is front and center in nearly every frame as Lord Doyle, a debauched high roller whose existence consists of spending all night downstairs in the casino, all day asleep in his luxury suite upstairs, and then back again. Sporting an upper-class British accent, a brightly-colored suit (with an ascot, for heaven’s sake!) and a pencil-thin mustache, Doyle at first to be a parody of an aristocrat.

But Doyle isn’t at all what he appears. Despite his upper-crust demeanor, he’s been losing big at the baccarat tables, so much so that he’s entreating a surprisingly kindly loan shark (Fala Chen) to extend him a little more credit. “Probability says I have to start winning,” he pleads.

Tilda Swinton pops up briefly as a very unconventional private investigator in “Ballad of a Small Player.” (Netflix)

Then a private investigator (Tilda Swinton, frizzy-haired and near cartoonish) shows up, implying that Doyle has even worse trouble waiting for him back home in Britain. I won’t reveal more, because what’s fun in “Small Player” is watching Farrell’s performance shape-shift as the world puts the screws to Doyle, revealing the desperate human being behind the ascot.

It does feel like the performance is at odds with the visual cacophony of the movie, as relentless and ultimately repetitive as the Muzak in a hotel elevator. The scenes of endless excess, of all-you-can-eat buffets and piles of money strewn across a hotel bed, become wearying after a while.

That’s sort of the point of the movie, that Doyle can never get enough – money, champagne, life – to satisfy himself. Viewers, on the other hand, may hit their limit far earlier, especially when screener Rowan Joffe (adapting the novel by Lawrence Osborne) cheats in the film’s second half with a couple of easy-to-spot narrative twists in an attempt to keep things from getting too monotonous.

Watching “Ballad of a Small Player,” I felt a lot like Doyle – never bored, but never satisfied either. It’s a movie made with a lot of skill and energy, but one that doesn’t know when it’s time to cash out and walk away from the table.

“The Ballad of a Small Player” is now in theaters, and will premiere Oct. 29 on Netflix.