Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli is a film depicting the culture and history surrounding two or three generations of South Asians. We experience that level of culture with Zed (Riz Ahmed), a second generation South Asian. Despite his busy schedule as a rapper, he eventually makes time to visit his family in Britain. A post-fast dinner has the family talking about the racism they have to deal with, and joke about how they deal with it better than other South Asian ethnic groups. The struggles viewers see here, though, also deal with the personal and physical, as Zed deals with a sickness spreading within his body.

Films about culture are inherently literary and the same goes with Mogul Mowgli. There’s a magic realist aspect to this that is reminiscent of Rushdie but without the controversy. Most of the film takes place in the hospital where Zed is reluctantly staying, and there he experiences dreams where he fights different figures. Sometimes, his opponent is the human manifestation of the ghosts of the partition between Pakistan, Zed’s ancestral country, and India. At other times, it’s RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan). He’s bafflingly famous and a much younger British Pakistani rapper with face tattoos and releases worse music than him.

Partition and competition make for compelling adversaries. So with this and Zed’s illness, it feels like a a third or fourth adversary feels like it’s piling on him a bit. That fourth conflict is between him and his father Bashir (Alyy Khan). The latter basically believes that all it takes for him to cure his illness is through willpower and strength, which is a worrisome perspective. As an immigrant I’ve encountered enough older men who think like this. Ahmed, who co-wrote the film with Tariq, can write such archetypes, but they’re still archetypes. This is also the first time I’ve struggled with British accents on recent films.

Nonetheless, Ahmed is central to the film and that focus is what makes it work. This is also, as other critics pointed out, the second time he’s playing a musician with an illness. But he makes this second time work almost as well as the first time, and I wouldn’t mind a third time. Every scene that intends to break viewers’ hearts are successful. There’s specifically one where he calls his girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart), only for her to call him her ex. Some people and emotions fade when bad things happen, but this film examines lingering ghosts and how to face them.