The latest turn in the twisty, quixotic career of Colin Farrell is a surreal and supernatural gambling tale of one not-quite-posh poseur’s days of reckoning when every debt, every losing streak, every health problem and every crime comes due.

“Ballad of a Small Player” is a lot like Farrell’s own approach to his art. At 50, his filmography still runs cold to hot. Something like Apple TV’s “Sugar” and HBO’s “The Penguin” turns the heat back on, and he’s all-in on a daft gamble like “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” and a surreal saga of a card-playing, card-carrying addict like Lord Doyle, a loser who takes heart in “It’s not too late for you” advice, but for all the wrong reasons.

He’s played the long odds before. “The Lobster” and “The Banshees of Inishirin” paid off, after all.

This “Lord” Doyle is a “small player” with delusions of big time status. That ascot, those suits (green velvet when we meet him), the yellow leather gloves he passes off as “Saville Row’s finest” to anyone who asks (they don’t look tailored), it’s all part of passing himself as someone worthy of respect, deference and most important of all, credit.

Of course it’s a fake name. He sees himself as “a high roller on a slippery slope” in the “gambling capital of the world, Macao,” in his voice over introduction to the viewer. But only a fraud and con artist would think naming himself “Lord” or his son “Barron” would fool anybody with a lick of sense.

His debts at the hotel where he’s been staying in style is overdue. His lies only buy his a couple of days, his pathological need for credit to go back to the tables — punto banco Baccarat is his addiction of choice — gives him the sweats.

But a casino down the street might stake/trust him, the sympathetic doorman (Alan K. Chang) suggests. Not that things go any better at the Rainbow. He can’t even cover his top dollar champagne bar bill. A credit-line broker there Dao Ming (Fala Chen) helps him out, and lives to regret it. Because he’s determined to take down “Grandma (Deanie Ip), a mouthy oligarch’s wife with bottomless resources and uncanny luck at the tables.

Grandma calls him dirty names in Chinese and “Lost soul” to his face, in English, as she cackles and cleans his clock. Lord Doyle’s belief that he’s “standing at a statistical crossroads” and that his “run of bad luck” has to end, and with her. But it won’t and pleading with Dao Ming doesn’t move her.

But losing another gambler she’s staked to suicide shakes her, and she makes a connection with Mr. “I don’t have a gambling problem.” She tells him of the upcoming “Festival of the Hungry Ghost,” and as he sweats and hyperventillates when the bell tolls and the walls close in and old creditors (Tilda Swinton) storm in amongst the new ones, we have a hard time buying into Dao Ming’s faith.

“It’s not too late for you.”

We, like Farrell, assume that anything directed by Edward Berger (“Conclave,” “All Quiet on the Western Front”) is a safe bet. And the neon-bedecked Vegas-of-the-Orient setting and garish hotels and hotel rooms and (mostly Chinese) gambling addicts give us hope. But screenwriter Rowan Joffe (“Before I Go to Sleep”) adapting a Lawrence Osborne novel seems like an ill-advised bet.

But the right cards never seem to turn over in the right order for this gamble.

Unlike James Bond, our lead “explains” Baccarat (it’s not the same variation Bond played in the early films). The explanation lacks…something.

The life and death stakes suggest a supernatural “test” for Doyle, one presided over by Grandma and/or Dao Ming. But that, like must of what happens in the third act, is passed over as “ambigious.”

Farrell, Swinton, Chen and Ip do what they can with their characters. But it’s hard to decide if anyone here is just another demon or angel in Doyle’s fevered brain, or real. Alex Jennings plays a fellow card-hustling “gweilo” (white ghost “foreigner), but the character serves no purpose whatsoever.

We’re left with a shiny bauble of a “ghost man in Macao” parable, a “Twilight Zone” card game with a deck stacked by fate. But somebody at Netflix should have brought fate or Joffe back in for rewrites.

Farrell? He’s just waiting for the chance to go all-in on the next hand, the longer the odds the better.

Rating: R, profanity, suicide

Cast: Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings, Alan K. Chang and Tilda Swinton.

Credits: Directed by Edward Berger, scripted by Rowan Joffe, based on a novel by Lawrence Obsborne. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41