On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving home following a fancy dress party where she’s impeccably dressed as Missy Elliott. In the center of the road lies the corpse of her uncle Fred. With his death comes the funeral, and in Zambia, among Shula’s middle-class family of many aunties, there are certain expectations for mourning. It barely matters that she’s clearly not mourning her uncle, or that Fred’s reputation in life differed so wildly from how he’s being treated in death.
Zambian-Wealth director Rungano Nyoni made a startling feature debut with 2018’s I Am Not a Witch, which netted her a BAFTA. The surreal drama blended magical realism, social commentary, and scathing fable in a way that heralded the arrival of a bright new voice. Her follow-up only strengthens that status.
The awkward nature of grief offers some great laughs in the first third of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Her aunties are furious at Shula for not being hysterical enough in her grieving and keep sending her on expensive errands to ensure that Fred’s funeral is the social event of the season. Elaborate feasts are cooked (always by the women, of course) and some mourners wear t-shirts with the deceased’s face printed on them. Nyoni’s concern is with the women, these generations of one family who are expected to perform their grief as though it’s a test. When we hear from men, it’s either to deride them for their ineptitude (Shula’s father only calls her to ask for money) or outright cruelty (the memories of Fred.) These patriarchs who rule all are like toddlers, asking for cash and food and seemingly unable to acquire either on their own.
It’s not a spoiler to note that Shula and two of her young cousins were victims at the hands of Fred. Nyoni makes it clear but never as a big reveal or soapy development. That an extensive history of child sex abuse is at the heart of this family is the rot that lingers on the edges of every conversation. Chardy’s performance is one of perennial tension. She is still, seemingly calm, but slowly being chipped away at by the pain of unresolved trauma. Where her cousin Nsansa copes by drinking and a mordant sense of humour, Shula tries to get on with life but being forced to mourn your abuser is a special kind of hell. Her disturbance is revealed through some impressive sound design (courtesy of Olivier Dandré), which blends the cacophony of a bustling household with a drone-like noise that felt not unlike The Zone of Interest.
Nyoni’s dissection of familial trauma is not one with easy or satisfying resolutions. There’s an obvious generational divide regarding how to tackle the uncle Fred problem. Shula’s father tells her to move on but then sheepishly asks if he’d ever “done anything” to her. The aunties avoid the conversation or say it should be a matter of the past. Moments of penitence feel hollow when contrasted with how the family treats Fred’s widow, a very young woman and clearly a victim of his but viewed as an ungrateful parasite and failed spouse by her in-laws. Norah Mwansa, who plays the widow, is devastating in a mere handful of scenes.
I Am Not a Witch was more of a magical realist effort than this one, but On Becoming a Guinea Fowl still has moments of the surreal amid its painfully real domestic drama. Zambia faces frequent power cuts and everyone’s homes are at risk of flooding, which causes Shula’s visions of waking life and her dreams to bleed into one another. When she first sees Fred’s body, her younger self appears by his corpse, a moment of closure for her wrecked past. You can see the connective tissue between the films, both of which are fascinated by folklore and social conservatism’s restricting of African womanhood. But this definitely feels like a second film in that you can see how Nyoni built upon her strengths and focused on her technical craft over her desire to show off (but make no mistake: she can compose a shot like nobody’s business.)
If I Am Not a Witch heralded a bright young filmmaker with a unique point of view, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is confirmation of an exciting future for Nyoni and her eager audience. The way it builds from absurdist family drama to a reckoning of generational trauma is truly beautiful. There are no easy answers here, but Nyoni offers hope that the future will learn from the mistakes that came before it.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was acquired by A24 and is scheduled to be released in the United States on December 13th.