The visual font of addiction is so often relegated to drugs and alcohol, but addiction is a spiritual malady, and its expression is equally valid in all forms of spiritual disintegration. Addiction is also deceptive. It can look like someone being deeply passionate. Enmeshed in what they love to do. But this is addiction’s greatest trick, disguising pain for passion, because there is no amount that can be reached that sustains the addict. They will always be seeking and never find what they need, because what they want is spiritual release, and what they do is root themselves deeply in a black hole of cyclical behaviors that destroy themselves.
Addiction is a hungry ghost. By trying to fulfill pain, trauma, and unmet emotional needs by seeking some external thing, the addict will try to feed their ghost, but no amount of external stimulus would ever satisfy them, because the ghost itself must be addressed.
The concept of the Hungry Ghost, in recovery, is rooted in Buddhist traditions. In Ballad of a Small Player, Colin Farrell plays Lord Doyle, a gambler who has run out of luck just as his debtors have come to collect. Small Player takes place in Macau, China, during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the opulent, modern city opens its gates to ancestors from the lower realm, erecting effigies and offering filial piety, as a means to connect the living to the dead.
This is where Small Player takes up residence, within the form and function of a ghost story. Director Edward Berger reteams with cinematographer James Friend, following their steady-handed collaboration on All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Small Player is a visually sumptuous ghost movie that is in love with its own images. For good enough reason: It’s so pretty that you’ll spend the movie knowing it’s pretty and not thinking about too much else.
That the visual metaphor is linked to this central conflict of gambling addiction, though a relevant detail, is not as pertinent to the movie as a decadently lit city captured well. The story, then, adapted from the book by Lawrence Obsborne, is more of a conduit for aesthetic cityscapes that play with dualities — I.E. traditional vs. modern, living vs. dead — than it is a well-conveyed piece of visual story crafting.
Whether or not it’s a good proper movie, Edward Berger is making an assertion of style. His statement of intent is that he will make boldfaced, stylish cinema, wherein men confront their own agency and identity against the grinding gears of broken systems and institutional symbols (war, church, and money).
What Small Player achieves is a meditative evocation of addiction as a hungry ghost. Folks in Macau want to appease the dead, but among the living, drifters like Lord Doyle are practically dead already in a spiritual sense — only left with desire and longing, and the insatiable need to fulfill that until they’ve become something like a ghost themselves.
Addiction is hard to convey properly. Sometimes you get a story that tells the audience how hard it is. How brutal the life is. What it’s like for the character. What their addiction means to the world they inhabit. How the cycle is perpetuated and is an ever-growing generational curse without end. Then there’s movies like Small Player, that exist within this visual motif of liminal spaces, and work as tone-poems about addiction. What makes this work more unique though, is it captures not just the outcomes, but that the frame exists within this self-seeking, sorry loneliness. It is depressive and arresting at once.
Many frames are paintings. Most of them say essentially the same thing, that the loss of connection in modern life creates the most desperate form of modern addiction, that is directly serviced by the spaces where it’s created. It takes a while to stop searching for story and to allow Small Player to proceed as a visually astute metaphorical plot, but it certainly gets there, aided by a good lead performance, spiritually seeking cinematography, and a brave belief that the image is always enough.