Ballad of a Small Player, the latest film by Conclave director Edward Berger, has two main things going for it.

One is an arresting lead performance by Colin Farrell. He plays Lord Doyle, a con man and gambling addict hiding out in the casinos of Macau; given that he spends much of the film looking on the verge of psychological or physical annihilation, one wonders what he could possibly be running from that might be worse than this.

The other is a showy style that evokes influences as wide-ranging as Wong Kar-wai and Yorgos Lanthimos. Cinematographer James Friend creates a purgatorial realm of disorienting angles and neon lights too sickly to be beautiful, the nightmarishness further underlined by Volker Bertelman’s thundering score. Add in the costumes by Lisy Chrisl, with their clashing colors and tacky accessories (a pair of Pepto-pink double-loop glasses here, a pair of squeaky yellow gloves there), and you get a film that’s purposely unpretty but always interesting to look at.

Unfortunately, these strengths are working in service of a story too flimsy to support them, an unsatisfying combination of threadbare tropes, predictable twists and a wafer-thin character study. Ballad of a Small Player has plenty of flash, as befits the story of a man whose everyday wear consists of jewel-tone velvet suits and silk ascots. But there’s not much substance to be found underneath the consciously cheap glamour.

Adapted by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later, The American) from a novel by Lawrence Osborne, the film finds Doyle already on the brink of destruction. In Macau, he tells us via voiceover, his status as a gwai lo (foreigner) grants him a sort of invisibility: “Here, I barely exist. Here, I am whoever I want to be.” But as he’s quickly discovering, even that superpower has limits. The casino hotel he’s staying at is threatening to kick him out unless he settles his astronomical bill. A dogged investigator, Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), is hot on his tail, eager to recoup the money he swindled from a rich old lady back in the U.K.

He, of course, has no cash to pay back anyone for anything, being the sort of gambler who can’t find a stray bill in his pocket without immediately blowing it at the nearest baccarat table. His body is falling apart, undone by either stress or decades of bad habits — he’s perpetually slicked in sweat, and racked by occasional bouts of debilitating internal pain. No wonder the guy can’t stop flashing to images of himself jumping off a very high building, even if he insists he’d never actually do it because suicide is “a permanent solution to temporary problems.”

Farrell’s precise comic timing and lack of vanity make Doyle watchable no matter how low he stoops, or how exasperating his behavior becomes. (At my Telluride screening, the crowd started groaning things like “Don’t do it, baby” when he finally gets a win only to contemplate yet another ill-advised bet.) But even his considerable charisma can’t answer the nagging question of why we’re following this dude at all. The script makes him out to be the archetypal “hungry ghost,” so driven by greed that he can never be satisfied, but doesn’t really flesh out his psychology beyond that; he’s all mindless drive and no complexity.

Regardless, Doyle’s luck changes when he meets Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a mysterious casino worker who takes pity on him over the shrewd warnings of Grandma (Deanie Ip), a hilariously crass high roller who frequents her table. (“I can burst his balls with one hand,” Grandma scoffs when she lays eyes on Doyle for the first time.) Though he immediately owes Dao Ming money — having tried to dine-and-dash a bottle of Cristal at her establishment — she seems moved by his promises that once he finally gets a big win, he’ll pay off not just his debts but hers.

But the semi-romance that should elevate the plot to a higher level of emotionality has, instead, the opposite effect. Chen is lovely as Dao Ming, a tender heart who insists it’s “not too late” for Doyle to become the better person she sees in him. But the character’s willingness to go out on a limb for a fuck-up she barely knows remains a puzzle, even after a whole scene in which she offers her own bittersweet backstory by way of explanation. To the end, she feels more like a symbol or a plot device than a person with any interiority of her own — making Ballad of a Small Player just another iteration on that tired trope in which Westerners go to exotic foreign lands for journeys of self-discovery, amid superstitious locals who exist solely to aid or hinder them on their paths.

Not that the film does all that much better by Doyle himself. While he does, in the end, undergo some sort of internal transformation, it’s one propelled by something closer to divine providence than any deep personal epiphany. He, like all the other characters in the film, seems to tilt at the whims of a screenwriter who wants to get to a specific ending, rather than one who much cares what’s going on inside these people. For a movie about a man running from the emptiness within, Ballad of a Small Player rings awfully hollow.