Director: Rungano Nyoni
Writer: Rungano Nyoni
Stars: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Esther Singini
Synopsis: On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family.
The road is long, lonely, and dimly-lit; all the more reason for Shula (Susan Chardy) to jam out during her late-night drive home from a friend’s dress-up party. The theme is unclear; Shula’s outfit appears to be part Eyes Wide Shut, part blow-up sumo wrestler costume from Spirit Halloween. We only see the lower half of her garb once she’s gotten out of the car, having come to a slow stop in the middle of nowhere in order to confirm what she believes she’s seen on the side of the road: A familiar-looking dead body on the side of the road. Once she’s sure it is who she initially thought it was, she makes a call, not to the police, but to her father (Henry B.J. Phiri). ““Dad, it’s Shula,” she says in Bemba. “I’ve found Uncle Fred’s body on Kulu Road.”
Her lack of emotion – of any inflection, for that matter – is disarming and humorous in equal measure. How can Shula be so stoic given what she has just seen? There must be something we don’t know about Uncle Fred that is causing her to react this way, no? These questions, among many others of similarly ambiguous nature, may not be answered explicitly over the course of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, but it would be far from fair to say that any of them are left in the dust alongside Fred. Things in this dark, tragicomic familial drama are more complicated than the questions and answers one might find on an Ancestry.com quiz, as they stretch back generations, not merely to the moment Shula made what should have been a horrifying discovery.
Further proof that Shula’s response to Uncle Fred’s death is shared by others in her family comes in the form of her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), who drunkenly arrives to the scene by happenstance and can only laugh at the fact that her uncle’s body is lying just feet away from a brothel. Their states at the start of the film – Shula’s muted response, Nsansa’s cackling fit – immediately paint a not-so-vague picture that tells us something about their past with Uncle Fred. Did he hurt them in some way? Abuse, perhaps? The implications are evident yet not immediately spelled out, paving the way for what might culminate in an obvious reveal for some viewers, but a heartbreaking one nonetheless.
Said revelations come later, long after Shula and Nsansa end up at Shula’s mother’s home for the funeral proceedings, a long process that sees the entire extended family gathering in one home to grieve together over a number of days. But the tone quickly turns from solemnity to haste once Fred’s 20-something widow joins the group, as not only has the family descended upon one setting to mourn, but to stake their claim to Uncle Fred’s estate. He’d done well for himself, and despite the typical way these things would go – the widow normally receives her husband’s assets and holdings – Fred’s siblings and cousins argue that she never cooked, cleaned, or cared for him properly; a series of maltreatments that led to his sudden passing. When Shula first encounters the young woman, she’s searching for a place to urinate outside; Shula’s mother refused to let her use the bathroom indoors due to how she “caused” Fred’s death.
The anger for the loss of a beloved (and powerful) male figure in this family is primarily what propels On Becoming a Guinea Fowl forward, especially when juxtaposed with how Shula, Nsansa, and their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) grapple with the traumatic impact their uncle had on their lives, even if they believed it to have been left in the past. By burying their uncle, they inadvertently dug up old wounds, and the way Nyoni renders the gutting moments when these three young women attempt to express their previously-concealed agonies to their mothers and aunts makes for some of the more haunting non-horror sequences captured on film this year. Just two features into a promising career, Nyoni has already leveled up as an architect of narrative tension from her previous picture, 2017’s I Am Not a Witch, a film that similarly examined the preservation of family and cultural ideals despite the truth, especially as revealed by the young members of the story’s principal unit. Much of that is a credit to Chardy’s startling lead performance, a debut for the Zambian-English actor that fuels Nyoni’s pressure-cooker with its reserved nature.
That the director never gives in to the conventions of lesser narratives by having Shula arrive at a point where she unravels – or worse, returns to a Western home where she can pretend that the events of the previous days never unfolded as she returns to her apartment and/or cubicle – shows the confidence Nyoni has in the viewer’s investment. Admittedly, it’s not too difficult to latch onto the beats of a story like this, where the heroes and villains (for lack of more appropriate distinctions) are clearly identified. But it’s in her character’s complexities, expertly rendered and brought to pass during the family gathering, where Nyoni asserts the film’s intellect and understanding of what makes for a stirring, turbulent drama, especially one as culturally-specific as this.
Which brings us to the film’s title: Throughout the picture, Nyoni cuts from Shula and her family to clips from a television program called “Farm Club,” specifically an episode that looks at the guinea fowl, a “special and unusual” bird found in Africa. Like much of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’s subtext, the animal’s role in its own environment, let alone its relationship to this particular story, is unspecified, but as more about Uncle Fred and the young women who survived his abuse becomes clear, we come to learn that the guinea fowl has a distinct way of ensuring that other animals in its surroundings are kept safe from predators. Is the metaphor rather on the nose? Perhaps, but only when verbalized as plainly as this. Nyoni, meanwhile, lets the idea of the guinea fowl simmer, the same approach she takes to Shula’s realization that breaking free from her culture’s traditions may be the only way to survive the chokehold they have on her family, until the two collide in an unforgettable finale that is as empowering as it is unsettling. Sometimes, self-preservation is the only proper method of survival. Otherwise, you don’t become a guinea fowl: You become one of the prevalent predators the bird was warning you about in the first place.
