The second feature by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a brilliantly wry film of funeral traditions and familial idiosyncrasies. Tackling dark familial secrets with acerbic wit, it explores a culture of silence around sexual abuse. The result is a fiercely feminist tale filled with powerful observations, told through the eyes of a woman struggling with her commitment to community, as she’s backed into corners by social norms.
While the movie's humor and visual form verge on surreal, a deceptively withheld lead performance by Susan Chardy — who plays Shula, a woman visiting her Zambian hometown after many years abroad — helps ground it within social realism. Nyoni, who was similarly born in Zambia but raised in Britain, strikes this visual and tonal balance with an expert hand right from her opening scenes, which follow the surprising discovery of a dead body on an isolated road.
From there on out, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl sweeps through its mere 99 minutes with clamorous force. Implications eventually give way to revelations, but the story remains rooted in burning questions of how best to challenge a foundational status quo without breaking the bonds of family, recalling films like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, but blazing a unique path.
The movie's strange but revealing contrasts emerge minutes into its runtime, as Shula drives home from a costume party and discovers the corpse of her uncle — her mother's brother, Fred (Roy Chisha) — lying by the roadside. Dressed in a baggy black outfit reminiscent of '90s Missy Elliot, and wearing a bedazzled helmet that recalls Phantom of the Paradise, Shula exacerbates this visual disconnect with her icy, sardonic expression. When she calls her father (Henry B.J. Phiri) to relay the news, Fred's death isn't even the first thing she brings up.
While her response initially seems mysterious, one of the movie's fleeting hints of surrealist imagery wordlessly unveils what might be going on. As though she were having an out-of-body experience, she briefly sees her younger, adolescent self (played by Blessings Bhamjee) standing over Fred's body with a stern expression, wearing the very same ridiculous costume. It's bizarre, droll, and heartbreaking all at once, hinting at a character stuck in time, unable to move past something.
While the film eventually goes on to detail the reasons for her muted response, it isn't all that hard to put two and two together, especially when her inebriated cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up and pokes fun at her deceased relative as he lays nearby, referring to him as a "pervert." Their humor may seem cruel at the outset, but Shula and Nsansa's eyes suppress a lingering anguish that neither of them wants to discuss — or perhaps can't bring themselves to address.
As the days go by, and Fred's extended family arrives for his last rites, Shula reluctantly goes along with the various funeral traditions that involve the subservience of younger women, both to their older aunts — whose collective voice and physical presence envelopes the younger characters — and to the men of the family. It's her duty to cook, for instance, no matter her own emotional state, and she and several other women walk around the house on their knees or on all fours as part of their ritualistic duties, as more relatives gather and scenes grow more cacophonous.
However, as Shula and Nsansa fetch their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) from her college dormitory, the latter's pained demeanor, and a video confession she records, make it all the more urgent for Shula to try and convince her family of who Fred really was, and the things he may have done to his younger female relatives on more than one occasion.
While the details of Fred's past eventually come to light, Nyoni trusts her viewers to use inference and imagination. In the process, she paints a stark picture of the kind of memories that might be swirling in Shula's mind, as she balances being physically present for the funeral — and being there for her family — while being mentally checked out much of this time for the sake of her sanity.
The movie's harsh, upsetting soundscape (courtesy of composer Lucrecia Dalt) goes a long way toward crafting its atmosphere, creating an imposing space from which the younger women in the family have to constantly escape in order to breathe. More often than not, Shula, Nsansa, and their friends find themselves hidden away in a closet or pantry in order to steal swigs of alcohol and speak openly about Fred, in ways they cannot in front of the film's extended cast.
It's also worth noting that, while the structural impositions placed on Shula and her cousins are distinctly patriarchal, the men of their family rarely feature on screen. Instead, the constraints placed around the women are the focus, and the audience discovers each as it first appears in matter-of-fact fashion. These cultural curtailments are entirely self-evident, self-perpetuating, and widely understood, but they also serve logistical functions. For example, Shula is made to cook for Fred's young widow, Chichi (Norah Mwansa); someone has to.
The women of Shula's family all gather under one roof and sleep packed like sardines, making it hard to find moments of respite — especially when mourning Fred becomes a collective, at times performative, act. Shula's mother (Doris Naulapwa) cared deeply about her late brother, but the more mourners who gather, the more the lines between genuine affection and the demands of tradition begin to blur, and the more Shula’s extended family becomes concerned with keeping the peace, rather than acting on complaints about their loved ones.
When Shula tries to take a moment for herself, her numerous, yammering aunties yank her back into thick of things, usually at night, though she returns and re-settles into the family’s rhythms without a fuss. She knows this is what she must do, even though what she really wants is to scream from the rooftops about the type of person Fred really was.
The first time we see Shula's face — when she removes her bejeweled costume — Chardy's eyes are immediately striking. Her hair is frayed, which compliments the way she embodies a sense of exhaustion and repression. Nyoni's screenplay, which withholds information pivotal to the plot (and to Shula’s emotional state) for lengthy stretches, simply would not work if the movie's lead performance weren't so consistently captivating.
Chardy's approach to creating Shula is distinctly top-down, from stillness that disguises subtle movement (and movement that overcompensates for a desire to stay still) to her accent work and code-switching. Much of the movie is in Bemba, but for its English-language dialogue, whether Shula speaks with Chardy's natural English accent, or a Zambian accent, or a mix of the two, usually depends on who she's talking to, and with how much emotional force.
Shula is, effectively, a person in flux, who feels as though she has worked hard to escape her hometown — not just physically, but emotionally and socially — but is constantly drawn back into its orbit. Like Nyoni, Chardy was born in Zambia and raised in Britain, and together, they pour their emigrant anxieties into Shula, a woman who floats through the world buoyed by despondent fury at her inability to change the past, or the future.
To challenge an existing structure isn’t a logistical act, but a deeply human one, and Nyoni unfurls the distressing, amusing, and wholly enrapturing results of engaging with this necessary transformation. Through biting observations, careful camera movement, and performances that flesh out the hidden contours of every scene (and every character dynamic), On Becoming a Guinea Fowl bursts to life in unassuming ways. Though perhaps just as surprising as the movie’s simple visual conception is the complexity with which it arrives at its most powerful scenes, which center on the thin line between complicity and self-preservation, and on the rigid realities of belonging to a community while trying to re-shape it from within.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was reviewed out of its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. It arrives in theaters from A24 on Dec. 13.
