Review of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (d. Rungano Nyoni, 2025)
Consider, for a moment, the guinea fowl. Weighing in at just three pounds and thoroughly terrestrial, it scans as a sub-Saharan African variant of the turkey, with striking speckled plumage, a featherless, azure-hued head, and a small golden crest. One of the smallest cogs in the savannah ecosystem, you’re likelier to hear one before you see one amidst the tall grasses and thorny scrub. Innately wary, they nonetheless fulfill an outsize role: hovering underhoof of much larger prey, their calls—shrill, surprisingly loud, and rakes to nearby ears—alert fellow herbivores of theretofore unforeseen predators lurking in the shadows. Their watchful eyes, thus, are a boon to not just their own kind, but to all those around them. We never see the titular bird in Rungano Nyoni’s second feature On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, aside from an animated rendering of one in a children’s program that exposits much of this information. Instead, it symbolically presides over a narrative focused on what an ecosystem might look like without them, one where threats to the vulnerable’s safety go unchecked and subsequently become very real acts of violence. Without this built-in alarm system, these acts can continue to occur without any real consequences for the perpetrators. The result is a culture of silence, of which Nyoni’s film provides a rigorous taxonomy. In depicting the failures of one community to call out and address systemic abuse, Nyoni’s film serves as an ode to all the guinea fowls of the world who—however stridently or inconveniently—refuse to let such wrongs fall upon deaf ears.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl begins, as so many worthy cinematic mysteries do, with a body. Lying supine in the middle of a quiet, suburban road, our protagonist Shula (Susan Chardy, in a breakthrough performance) happens upon it while driving home late at night. She swiftly determines that it is her uncle Fred, and that he is, in fact, dead, though the cause is unclear. Not that this matters: we hear multiple characters proffer theories as to how Fred died throughout the film, though no consensus emerges, and Nyoni never provides any sort of flashback that makes things definitive. Suffice it to say, Fred was a man of many vices, the most vile of which are uncovered—gradually, and with an astonishing level of directorial restraint–by his extended family, which is mostly comprised of women (including Shula). This is decidedly not Fred’s story, though it’s haunted by his very lack of presence (in one of Nyoni’s most pointed touches, we never even see Fred’s face). That leaves us with a narrative built around the dual structuring absences of both the fowl and Fred, which leaves us with those caught in the middle: these women, who are attempting to thread the needle between the ostentatious displays of grief that their traditions mandate and the more sordid truths they know about the extent of Fred’s wrongs.
The film takes place in a middle-class neighborhood not unlike the one Nyoni grew up in in Zambia, a country where women simultaneously hold real power within the domestic sphere (the film’s press notes refer to Zambia’s “matriarchal society”) but are still subjected to more retrograde, misogynistic norms outside of it. Nyoni’s first feature, 2017’s I am Not a Witch, also took stock of a Zambian culture still attempting to solve modern problems with ancient solutions. It also introduced viewers to the hallmarks of the filmmaker’s own distinct style: an oblique storytelling approach enriched by uncanny imagery and a carcass-dry, satirical wit. All are on full display here once again, as Nyoni moves through her story with the slow-creeping insinuation of a bad dream. She frequently films from odd angles that often obscure parts of the frame, as in a late sequence at a flooded brutalist-style university campus building that has been transformed, inexplicably, into a thriving late-night party spot. There, Shula confronts her father, and the distanced framing, blaring music, and jutting angles of the concrete staircases literally prevent father and daughter from seeing eye-to-eye. That may sound on-the-nose (or on-the-beak), but Nyoni’s refusal to play things straight is less severe than surreal: the campus building is one of several waterlogged interiors that characters hardly seem to notice, much less mind, and the pacing is so unhurried as to be somnambulant. This wedding of po-faced absurdity and off-kilter revelation may test more restless viewers, but the film’s most obvious moments are also its most labored, as in the halting flashbacks that put too fine a point on the film’s titular framing device.
Which is not to say that Nyoni demands we take all her carefully-constructed incongruity at face-value, or as dreamworlds to simply lose oneself in. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is often scathingly funny, none more so than in its masterfully choreographed opening sequence, which sees Shula trying to explain Fred’s fate to an increasingly incredulous chain of characters. Just as often, though, it’s just plain scathing, as in the film’s final scene, which sees Fred’s much younger widow humiliated at his wake. There, as is traditional Zambian custom, Fred’s immediate family demand monetary compensation for her perceived failures as a spouse; whether he was murdered by one of his (many) enemies or succumbed to illness after patronizing a nearby brothel, they blame her for making him stray. While her sisters come to her defense, seeing the funeral devolve into a shouting-match, we abruptly cut to a close-up of Fred’s widow, head buried silently in her palm. Then, we pan up, beyond the cacophony, to the yard outside. There stands Shula, ever-steely, accompanied by the youngest daughters of this extended family, as she finally makes good on the promise of transformation embedded in the film’s title. Does it matter that no one inside can seem to hear her grating shrieks? We need only think back to the savannah, where such alarms ring out from much tinier sources, and can be heard by all those willing to listen.
Reviewed 3/14/2025