Avis Metacritic

Mogul Mowgli elegantly deals with essential issues while remaining entertaining.

Culturally rich and emotionally raw, Mogul Mowgli is a brilliant showcase for Riz Ahmed’s bevy of talents, and speaks visceral truth to the British-South Asian experience so rarely explored on screen.

This is abrasive, confrontational film-making, with a machine-gun assault of ideas and influences.

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.

While the picture doesn’t quite maintain its vigorous energy through to the very end, it is still a satisfyingly knotty exploration of the bi-cultural experience.

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.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

Handsome and intense, Ahmed is a reliably magnetic screen presence, while his punchy real-life chops as a rapper and lyricist also serve him well here. But his screenwriting skills are less assured, and Mogul Mowgli is strangely low on dramatic or emotional bite given its high-stakes storyline. Baggy editing, underexplained context and flat dialogue add to this muted effect.

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

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.