#A Revelatory Riz Ahmed Returns To His Roots In A Surreal Rap Drama

Zed makes a brief trip to his parents’ cramped London home for the first time in years, returning to unopened boxes and a mom who is convinced that he is plagued by the “evil eye.” His dad Bashir (a tremendous Alyy Khan) barely knows how to talk with him. Zed is embarrassed by his father’s various failed business ventures, but is even more embarrassed to learn secondhand of the hardships Bashir went through to escape the Partition of India. But a brief trip turns into a lengthy stay after a fight with a fan outside of the mosque sends Zed to the hospital with a terrifying diagnosis: he has an autoimmune disease that is quickly degenerating his muscles. Soon, he might not be able to walk without aid.

“Your body can’t recognize itself. So it’s attacking itself,” his doctor tells him in a line of dialogue which is almost hilariously on-the-nose. But the business of exploring one’s past is never subtle; it’s messy, and uncertain, and confused. And Ahmed and Tariq manage to capture the ineffable strangeness of this process — Ahmed in his distraught, almost helpless performance, and Tariq in the film’s surreal, dreamlike quality as the past and present bleed together.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Riz Ahmed is fast becoming one of our great screen talents. Even if it’s a little strange that he’s returning to the “sick musician” well so quickly after “Sound of Metal,” Ahmed always surprises you — whether it’s in a choice to whisper rather than scream, or stay still rather than twitch and lash out.

Zed is haunted by visions of a man in a flower headdress, who sings and mocks him throughout his treatment. The man in the flower headdress was on the cover of a dusty old cassette tape for “Songs of the Partition” which Zed had discovered in the pile of his father’s stored junk. He appears to Zed throughout the film — sometimes wearing a hospital gown, sometimes stark naked — chanting the phrase “Toba Tek Singh,” the name of a city in Pakistan, but also something that becomes a foothold of sorts for Zed, who incorporates the words into a song he’s forced to give to the other British-Pakistani rapper taking his place on the tour. But the phrase also becomes a shared language between Zed and his father — a way for them to finally connect and cross the divide between them. The man in the flower headdress, he claims to Zed in one of his visions, is himself “the sickness of the divide.”

Like I said, the metaphors aren’t subtle. But Tariq’s stripped-back direction and Ahmed’s willingness to go into messy, ambiguous territory when it comes to that classic “immigrant story” is amazing, even as Zed’s visions grow increasingly ludicrous and nonsensical. “Mogul Mowgli” is an imperfect exploration of cultural identity and generational trauma, but in its messiness and chaos, it feels all the more genuine. We children of the second generation may never cross that divide ourselves, but at least we can maybe learn a path.

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10