Mogul Mowgli review – strained but affecting tale of culture clash

As one of the great multi-talented artists currently working in British film, Riz Ahmed – actor, activist, essayist, rapper – has spent a good deal of the last few years putting the conflicting experiences of second generation immigrants to paper. Now, with Mogul Mowgli, he’s finally brought these feelings to the big screen in what is a deeply personal and affecting but also messy and self-indulgent film.

Ahmed plays Zed, a British rapper on the cusp of breaking into stardom in America with his passionate and powerful lyrics about his Pakistani origins, even though he’s taken pains to distance himself from his familial roots – he bristles at being called his real name, Zaheer, and it transpires that he hasn’t seen his parents in two years. With a make-or-break tour of Europe on the horizon, Zed returns home to London for a week of reunions before the gigs start.

He finds a frosty reception. His parents resent his absence more than they appreciate his return, and the young men at the local mosque accuse him of abandoning his roots – roots that were planted when Zed’s father Bashir (Alyy Khan) dramatically fled the violence of Partition-era India. As his home and adopted cultures clash, Zed is struck down with a degenerative muscle illness, caused by an autoimmune disorder that one doctor describes as “his body not recognising itself.”

It’s an outrageously heavy-handed metaphor to drive a plot, one which threatens to overwhelm the keenly observed social and cultural dilemmas found elsewhere in Ahmed’s script (co-written by director Bassam Tariq). Ahmed interrogates the various ways in which immigrants try to integrate with British society whilst keeping their own identities alive, and how impossible this push-pull dynamic can feel, and there are some deeply cathartic moments whenever Zed briefly finds the balance that keeps both his family and career on side.

Bringing his own words to life, Ahmed gives a fantastic central performance, perhaps the best of his career so far. He’s magnetic whenever Zed performs, half-snarling his verses, often without any sort of backing music, and his misery and frustration as his condition consumes ever more of his movement and independence is visceral. There’s not much in the hospital sequences that you haven’t seen before, as Zed rails against the injustice of his condition and struggles through physical therapies and humiliating setbacks, but Ahmed sells both the physical and mental pain of the process, and his fevered dreams allow for some very arresting imagery.

The trauma of the India-Pakistan partition has clearly filtered through all of Zed’s family, as he’s haunted by a human embodiment of Toba Tek Singh, a town in Pakistan that, thanks to a satirical short story, became synonymous with the inhuman division of the two nations. Singh aggressively guides Zed through his family’s history, and a compelling dream logic takes hold of the film in these moments, though Tariq returns to a few recurring images a few too many times.

Even if Mogul Mowgli’s big ideas are handled sloppily at times, it finds rich material when it dives into the more personal, specific moments. As a showcase for Riz Ahmed as a screenwriter it shows a lot of spark and promise. As a vehicle for Ahmed the actor, it further proves him as one of the most exciting, underrated stars working today.

Mogul Mowgli was screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2020. Find out more and get showtimes here.