Riz Ahmed owns the stage.

It’s been quite the decade for Riz Ahmed. Ten years on from his big break as a confused, would-be suicide bomber in Four Lions, Ahmed’s star has been on a steady ascent ever since.

From Nightcrawler to Jason Bourne to Rogue One to Venom, Riz Ahmed’s name has certainly been getting around Hollywood, as his roles grow bigger and bigger with every passing year. But, despite becoming the toast of the town, there’s clearly something deep within the actor urging him back to his roots.

Between Sound of Metal (which is due out later this year btw) and Mogul Mowgli, Riz Ahmed has clearly decided to make 2020 personal. However, as paradoxical as it sounds, despite the small scale and intimacy of his upcoming roles, this may well end up the biggest year of his career.

On the eve of his first world tour, rising British-Pakistani rapper Zed (Riz Ahmed) returns home to check in with his parents, but as a mysterious autoimmune disease strikes, his big break looks to be vanishing before his eyes. With his illness and rapidly decreasing mobility leaving him vulnerable, Zed is haunted by hallucinations and apparitions, as he’s forced to confront his past, his family, his career, and the uncertainty of his legacy.

Produced, co-written, and of course starring the man himself, to say that Mogul Mowgli is a personal project for Riz Ahmed would be something of an understatement. From his character’s career choice (Ahmed has been mixing acting with life as an MC since his teenage years), to the film’s deep dive into Zed’s internal and external struggles as a second generation British-Pakistani immigrant, the film feels as much a journey of self-discovery for the actor than anything else.

As a man who’s spent his career to date patiently searching for his voice within an industry dominated by white faces, Mogul Mowgli’s overriding themes of transnational identity and ancestral trauma clearly hold a deep connection to Ahmed. A vocal critic of the film industry’s shocking lack of diversity, Ahmed’s chance to tell a story that connects not only with himself but with others likewise searching for representation, is something that he evidently takes pride in.

Purely on a surface level, Mogul Mowgli is a compelling, against-all-odds drama about one man’s battle with a debilitating disease, the kind that’s been bothering awards seasons for many a year. That alone, with Riz Ahmed as star, would be enough to peak people’s interest, however, this is a film that aims for so much more.

As Zed’s autoimmune disease begins to bite, slowly compromising his ability to move at all, so too do his hallucinations, as conflicts concerning his family, his cultural disconnect, and his life choices, manifest themselves in surreal, haunting dream sequences that add many layers to the film’s thematic heft. Full of dust, ash, spice, and flowers, the very fabric of Zed’s reality warp, as his world blends vividly with his father’s past and the tortured memories of escape from India to the UK.

These scenes that weave themselves into the very fabric of the film, haunting Zed’s gradual decline, pack a lot in, and despite its condensed 90-minute running time, Mogul Mowgli carries its thematic weight well. With cultural and generational divide, race, immigration, religion, identity, and guilt intertwining, it’s not always an easy watch, as the full scale of Zed’s condition is laid bare and his disorientating hallucinations send the narrative all over the place, but it’s a thoroughly rewarding one nonetheless, grabbing hold of you and not letting go.

Zed’s struggles with both his physical condition and the mental tole of the familial disconnect it heightens, is where the film’s true power lies. As Zed deteriorates, leaving him more and more reliant on the parents he has distanced himself from, director Bassam Tariq works every avenue he can within his limited budget to give Mogul Mowgli as much punch as possible.

Daring, experimental, and frequently mesmerising, Bassam Tariq does an incredible job conveying both Zed’s physical descent and his inner turmoil, turning what is, on the surface at least, a rather simple story, into a complex and utterly compelling one. Unconventional in its construction, often dreamlike in its execution, and visually innovative throughout, Tariq has crafted an audacious piece of cinema that plays with your head while never forgetting its heart

Never opting for the easy root, Tariq and Ahmed’s script is raw and often uncompromising in its approach, eschewing the various cliches that come with your average physical decline drama while ensuring we’re always kept emotionally engaged. But, of course, this would all be for naught if it weren’t for the all-encompassing performance from Riz Ahmed himself.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is Riz Ahmed’s film through and through. While he’s surrounded by a superb all-Asian cast doing fine work supplementing his talents, Ahmed puts in a career best performance full of intensity, compassion, and personality that channels his emotional connection to the material into producing something of nuance, rawness, and power.

Naturally, you have the pure physicality of Zed’s disease, which Ahmed throws himself into with full conviction, however, there’s far more to this than exploitative, Oscar-bothering disability porn. Unwilling to smooth the edges of such a debilitating disease, Ahmed doesn’t hold back as he lays out the true ugliness of the situation, both physically and mentally, while always feeding it back into Zed’s cultural, ancestral, and religious anxieties.

Add to that the superbly staged MC scenes that thread beautifully throughout the film, and you have a real mic-drop moment from Ahmed as he delivers a defining moment in his burgeoning career. Able to hold the stage just as well as he can hold the screen, the actor imbues physicality and vulnerability as Mogul Mowgli marks a watershed moment for him.

Through Bassam Tariq’s inspired, uncompromising visuals and a powerful, career-defining performance from Riz Ahmed, Mogul Mowgli is a beautifully rendered and thematically rich tale of identity, loss, pride, and generational trauma. Far more than the against-the-odds, awards-friendly disability drama it first appears, Mogul Mowgli is an emotionally raw, but painfully heartfelt, tribute to the often-unseen truths of the British-Asian experience.

Mogul Mowgli is available to stream on BFI Player now.