‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ intrigues, enrages, haunts

Returning home for a funeral is more than facing loss, mourning a loved one, and having to accept the finality of death. It’s having to wrangle with the fact that “home” isn’t just the house you grew up in or the town you moved away from. It can be a gauntlet of generational trauma threatening to swallow you whole. 

At least that’s what it’s like for the protagonist of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the latest film from Zambian writer/director Rungano Nyoni. What begins as a darkly comic look at a young woman enduring the onslaught of her family’s grieving rituals evolves into something more haunting and harrowing.

When the film begins, we meet Shula (Susan Chardy), a young woman dressed up as Missy Elliott from the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” as she grooves to music in her car. Along the side of the road, she discovers a dead body. It’s her uncle Fred. For a flash, as she gets closer to the body to be sure, we see her not as she is now, in her twenties, but as she was as a young girl (Blessings Bhamjee.) 

Her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), drunk from a night out, also happens upon the scene. The two spend the night in Shula’s car waiting for the police to retrieve the body, discovering in the morning that they’ve found their deceased uncle walking distance from a local brothel. After waking up at her mother’s place to relatives moving furniture and setting the scene for the funeral and its requisite grieving period, Shula nopes out of the proceedings, retreating to a hotel room. 

She seems detached from the entire affair, “working from home” from the room at her undefined job, planted on a Zoom meeting with a Macbook screen plastered with predominantly white and older faces broken into a gridlike “Hollywood Squares.” But a knock at the door brings her assembled aunties, a small team of elder matriarchs who judge, sneer, and harass Shula into packing up and returning to her mother’s home. They interrogate her about the finding of Fred’s body, admonish her for having bathed in the hotel when she’s supposed to be grieving. Whatever Shula thought she would be doing for the subsequent days goes out of the window and she is conscripted into a litany of gendered labors.

Nyoni draws a clear distinction between the Shula we see in her car, in her hotel room, and the Shula who falls in line with the customs and hierarchy of her family. Her mother’s house becomes overrun with relatives, but all the men we see always seem to be sedentary, while the women are constantly cooking or traveling to pick up more relatives, who in turn also need to be fed and tended to. But one of the houseguests brings into clearer focus the rot at the core of this entire endeavor — Fred’s widow.

There are some spoilers beyond this point in the review. If you would prefer to go in fully blind, consider returning to this after watching.

All the family on Fred’s side insists that none of the younger cousins cook for the widow or her people, treating them all like second-class citizens because they believe Fred’s widow was an insufficient wife and that is what killed him, not his rampant alcoholism. When Shula finally meets the widow peeing outside the house because they’re not allowed to use the bathroom, she discovers her to be no older than 20. 

Shula treks to Fred’s house to retrieve the widow’s phone charger, only to find the widow’s grandmother taking care of a small group of kids, all Fred’s, the eldest seven years old. The quick math brings bile to the throat and all the other whispered confessions and open secrets become too much to keep down.

The way Nyoni presents this story is so interesting and engrossing. Those who have seen her 2017 debut feature, “I Am Not a Witch,” will already be familiar with her assured and somewhat mischievous approach to depicting the absurd and surreal. But here, so much is internalized. Chardy’s central performance as Shula is a touching masterclass at how much can be communicated by the eyes, through stillness, and projecting interiority without dramatic monologues or big, tearful “for your consideration”-style acting. 

Nyoni holds back from explaining too much. There’s a patience to the way the story unfolds, the connections the audience is expected to make, and whether or not they can navigate how nimbly she shifts the tone. There’s a moment where Shula is tasked with dictating Fred’s obituary to a local print shop, and the juxtaposition between the emotional inflection of it being read aloud and her flat delivery of its sentimental words over the phone elicits some much needed gallows humor. Nyoni so effortlessly outlines the pecking order within the family, drawing a line between the generations of women and their differing approaches to accepting the way the men are protected from accountability. 

Perhaps the two heaviest moments come with each of Shula’s parents. Shula confronts her father (Henry B.J. Phiri) about his dead brother-in-law being an abuser and a pedophile, and he brushes it off, saying what’s done is done, before asking her for some money for the party he’s in the middle of throwing. After Shula leaves, her father calls her on the phone. She hasn’t made it out of the building yet, standing far enough that she can still be seen, but obscured by the architecture of the venue. He asks if Fred ever did anything to her, and she says he hadn’t.

In the very next scene, she confronts her mother (Doris Naulapwa), asking why she never told her father about what happened. Shula’s mother simply says, “You told me not to,” to which Shula asserts that she was only a child. A dark dirge plays on the score while Shula’s mother gives her a shopping list instead of engaging with this trauma as the two move through a backyard full of hungry, complicit men waiting to be fed again.

Throughout the film, the narrative cuts away to snippets of a children’s educational program called “Farm Camp,” a “Sesame Street”-eqsue show with a recurring segment teaching kids about animals. It’s not until the final act that we see the segment in full and the animal it wants to spotlight. Once the title’s true meaning is revealed, it brings the film’s closing scenes to a stirring and haunting crescendo, one that will stick with the viewer for a long time to come.

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” cements Nyoni as one of the medium’s most promising storytellers. Filmmakers whose debuts leave the viewer convinced they just witnessed the emergence of a future great are plentiful, but directors whose follow-up improves upon and expands their estimation in our minds are truly special. It feels like Nyoni is just getting started.

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is currently streaming on HBO Max and is available to rent or own digitally on all VOD platforms.