Ballad of a Small Player has now landed on Netflix, and its ending not only delivers a twist that, in truth, you’ll probably have seen coming, but also might leave you wondering about the ultimate fate of Colin Farrell’s Lord Doyle.
Well, we say Lord Doyle, but as we quickly discover, Lord Doyle is actually Brendan Reilly who stole nearly £1 million from a previous client and fled to Macau. Despite this undeserved windfall, he’s in massive debt when we first meet him and only has days left to pay back what he owes to various casinos.
Salvation appears to come in the form of loan shark Dao Ming who can not only help Doyle clear his debts, but also might put him on a path of righteousness. But as we discover at in Ballad of a Small Player’s ending, Dao Ming isn’t exactly who she appears to be – at least not for the entire time in the movie.
What to Read NextBallad of a Small Player ending explained: What happened to Dao Ming?
Dao Ming and Doyle meet during the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts and spend a night together, only for Dao Ming to have disappeared the next morning, leaving Doyle only a mysterious set of numbers on his hand. But Dao Ming didn’t just disappear, she died by suicide that same evening.
Every time we see Dao Ming after that night, she is actually a ghost or a figment of Doyle’s imagination, whichever you prefer to think. Dao Ming appears to help Doyle after he has a heart attack (more on that in a bit), and then tries to guide him away from becoming a Hungry Ghost – a restless spirit that’s “driven by greed” and can “never be satisfied”.
“Everyone’s going to perceive the movie to their own liking. For me, she dies during the movie,” director Edward Berger told TUDUM. “I do believe, in our story, she’s a ghost. [She’s] taking him through his life and guiding him. An act of redemption.”
During this time, Doyle asks Dao Ming what the numbers mean that she wrote on his hand, and she enigmatically replies that they are a “test”. It’s a test he initially fails as he discovers that it’s actually the code to Dao Ming’s secret stash of money, which he takes back to the casinos and, miraculously, starts a winning streak.
The casino manager confronts Doyle over his winning streak, saying that security footage shows he’s playing with “a ghost attached” to him and, as a result, is banned from every casino. Doyle pleads for one final change, a game where he’ll stake all of his winnings on one hand of baccarat – if he wins, he’ll leave; if he loses, it proves there’s no ghost.
Doyle wins, and pays off all of his various debts. There’s money left over to help Dao Ming with her debts too, but when he goes to her casino, he’s told that she died on that first night of the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts.
Shaken by the revelation, Doyle is tempted into a one final lucrative bet, but manages to turn it down. He hasn’t become a “Hungry Ghost” and instead chooses to burn the rest of his winnings that were intended for Dao Ming. It’s his “offering to the dead” as Dao Ming told him about on the first night they met.
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Is Doyle dead in Ballad of a Small Player?
Given the revelation with Dao Ming, we don’t blame you for wondering whether Doyle has actually been dead since his heart attack too. Perhaps everything from that moment onwards was Doyle in a sort of purgatory, a Buddhist hell known as Naraka which is described to him by Dao Ming as “The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts”.
There’s also the story that’s relayed to Doyle by fellow con man addict Adrian Lippett that sounds an awful lot like what happens to Doyle after his heart attack: “You’ve heard the one about the gambler who wakes up in the afterlife, comes to in a sumptuous casino, champagne on ice, girls everywhere, wins every single hand, one after the other after the other. He can’t lose.
“Eventually he turns to the player next to him and says, ‘I didn’t think I was gonna make it to heaven, I thought I was destined for the other place.’ The player next to him looks at him and says,” Lippett explains, with Doyle finishing off the anecdote: “This is the other place.”
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It’s a bleak reading of the movie if Doyle manages to see the error of his ways too late, only able to avoid being stuck for eternity in the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. It’s a more positive outlook to say that when Doyle told Dao Ming that it’d “take a miracle to change a man like me”, that miracle is Dao Ming. That certainly sounds like the way Berger intended for the movie to come across.
“Dao Ming helps Doyle through this. And he finds a centre, the beginning of a path towards liberation. It’s also a liberation from falling into addiction. He’s able to shed it and just move past it and find some sort of peace that will allow him to hopefully lead a good life,” Berger added to TUDUM.
“He does it, in the end, for her. She saved him from his addiction, and he gives to her in the afterlife what she always needed in life.”
What’s more, the scene that plays during the credits is Doyle’s dance with private investigator Cynthia Blithe. Originally intended to play during the movie, Berger moved it to the credits to leave audiences on a more uplifting note after a stressful movie, as well as an indication that Doyle has better things to come in future.
“It’s a candy for the audience, it releases you with joy and happiness, and it’s a dance, it’s a celebration of life. It’s a celebration of these two characters’ lives. And that they may have a new beginning.”
Ballad of a Small Player is available to watch now on Netflix.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
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