Mogul Mowgli

Acting may be a collaborative art form, but Mr. Ahmed also flies solo with considerable grace.

Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli is enrapturing, revelatory, and at all times, a nightmarish accounting of the bonds that make us, but can easily break us as well.

Ahmed is at his best in Zed’s darkest hour, as he struggles to hold it together in a hospital cubicle. It’s blistering stuff.

Tariq began his career as a documentary filmmaker, and now he has made a drama that rings with truth, about a musician’s ambition, a son’s relationship with his father and how the immigrant experience shapes following generations.

Outside of Ahmed’s seething, spitting, can’t-look-away performance, Mogul Mowgli is a sparsely scripted but scratchily atmospheric culture-clash drama that runs on some quite traditional father-son melodramatics. But considering the film outside the performance would be a mistake.

A film that is chock full of insight, piercing ideas and visual metaphors that unfortunately are never fully realised.

The canned British character study Mogul Mowgli disappoints on a few levels, especially given its admirable focus on authenticity and cultural identity in a kitchen-sink drama about Zed (Riz Ahmed), an aspiring British Pakistani rapper.