‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ Is Shocking, Surreal — and Absolutely Brilliant

There’s nothing like starting a movie with a running gag, and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl kicks off with a beauty. A young woman Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving home late at night. She notices something in the road. It’s a body. Not only that — Shula recognizes the corpse. He was a relative. She calls the authorities. Soon, her party-girl cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) stumbles into the scene as well, and begins drunkenly dancing in front of the car’s headlights. But that’s not the funny part. Shula had been at a costume party and is dressed like a dead ringer for Missy Elliott in the music video for The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly). The sunglasses, the bejeweled headpiece that looks like a superhero’s helmet, the black baggy blow-up suit — it’s the full package. Shula is trying to process everything while dealing with a dead man, the cops, and a trashed family member screaming at her. And the whole time, you keep waiting for her to turn to the camera and ask, “Beep beep, who’s got the keys to the jeep?” Vroooom!

What disrupts the playful opening to what will become a quietly devastating look at PTSD, however, is a sudden cut to a girl crouching next to the body. She seems to appear out of nowhere. Shula catches a glimpse of the child after walking back to her car. They lock eyes. Neither of them say a word. And then you notice the preteen is wearing the exact same costume as Shula. The two stare at each other, separated by decades yet both connected by the same horrible history, all of it tethered to the person lying dead on the asphalt.

There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature, and like the Zambian filmmaker’s awe-inspiring debut, I Am Not a Witch (2017), it proves she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart. Some of these moments are as eerie as they are mesmerizing — there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Shula strolling past an unidentified figure covered in sanitary napkins that leaves behind a feeling of both bewilderment and dread. Most of these moments telegraph that this world is not conclusion, and ghosts lurk everywhere whether you acknowledge them or not. Both personal and collective memory banks are filled to the brim with them, and sometimes it takes a random cadaver in the road to remind everyone that they can try to forget the past, but the past never, ever forgets them.

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Because the dead man was Shula’s Uncle Fred — and Uncle Fred was a bad guy. It was an open secret around town that he was a pedophile and a serial sexual

predator, something Shula knows firsthand. She was far from the only one who he left scarred. Still, both her extended family and the local Mourning Industrial Complex insist that everyone sweeps these oh-so-inconvenient facts under the rug, lest everyone have to deal with an extremely uncomfortable, 10-ton pachyderm in the middle of the room. Even though Shula has only been back in town a few days — a glimpse of a Zoom meeting suggests a professional life in the big city and leagues away from her kin — a cabal of aunties expect her to adhere to tradition. That means tending to his extremely young widow, pitching in with the funeral arrangements and the wake, and enduring an endless amount of performative grieving, the more hysterical the better. It also involves a lot of serving the elders, many of which are men who explicitly tell Shula to keep quiet about all of those long-ago sins and scandals, and who implicitly view Fred’s reign of terror as just another fact of life.

It takes a village to pretend nothing ever happened, and you can feel the rage building, slowly but exponentially, as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl sketches out interlocking circles of complicity. This pedophile’s victims span generations. Everyone knew. No one stopped it from continuing. At one point, Shula wonders why no one stood up for her. We did, the aunties tell her. We talked to him about it. And? “He said he would change,” they casually reply. Then they yell at her for calling them out. You wonder how many times this same conversation has happened with other women in the community, and how many of these types of conversations never happened at all. Just forget about it, the daughters and sisters and nieces would have been told. But Shula remembers that girl she saw at the site of the accident. The same girl that sat with a hot-water bottle on her tummy, watching a kids’ show that taught her about a bird.…

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About the film’s title: It ties into that jovial TV program Shula caught in her youth, and that Nyoni keeps cutting back to; the grainy footage shows us a bunch of African youngsters on a farm, being lectured about the animal world. It’s not until we nearly reach the end of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that we learn a certain characteristic regarding this native, chicken-like creature. It warns the flock about danger. And after having delivered a pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to speak out regardless of such stigmas, Nyoni gives the movie an ending that seems to blend all of the sorrow, the fury, and the symbolic gestures into one loud cri de coeur. The story begins with a dead body. It ends with a living sisterhood that refuses to stay silent one second longer.