Review: On Becoming A Guinea Fowl

In the trembling hush of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Rungano Nyoni doesn't ask you to sit comfortably. She asks you to sit with grief, with complicity, with secrets so tightly sealed they echo. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb where the rituals of mourning come wrapped in cultural precision and gendered obedience, Nyoni’s sophomore feature unfolds like a whispered accusation: soft in tone, thunderous in implication.

It begins with a body on the road, Uncle Fred’s, seen through the blinking lights of Shula’s car, and through her Missy Elliott party costume, which is not the only disguise we’ll see worn. Susan Chardy plays Shula with a coiled stillness that unravels over the course of the film, not through explosive confrontation but through stolen glances, withheld comments, and one too many silences. Her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), drunk and chaotic, is Shula’s disorienting mirror, another woman orbiting a death that feels more like an indictment than a loss.

Nyoni sketches out the mourning process with a delicate, almost procedural pace: women crawling into the house to honor the dead, songs about death’s slow arrival, men barking food orders while truths simmer unspoken. This is ritual as performance, and performance as suppression. But Nyoni is less interested in anthropology than she is in atmosphere, the kind that makes you hold your breath without knowing when it’s safe to let go.

What slowly unfurls is the realization that Uncle Fred was no pillar of virtue. He was a predator, and the mourning is a stage for competing griefs: one for a man who died near a brothel, and one for the innocence he took. The brilliance of Nyoni’s storytelling is how she lets this truth drip out, in Bupe’s too-bright smile after a suicide attempt, in the casual cruelties of Fred’s sisters who shame his widow, in the cold way inheritance is discussed like blood owed.

There’s rage here, but it’s the smothered kind. Rage that simmers beneath every pan stirred by obedient daughters. Rage that pulses in every “stay quiet” whispered for the sake of tradition. Nyoni isn’t staging a screed; she’s conducting an exorcism. Her camera, guided by David Gallego’s haunted lens, moves with precision, framing domestic spaces like traps, not homes.

Sometimes the metaphors wobble. A child-version of Shula appears like a specter from a more literal film, and a surreal moment involving the titular guinea fowl strains against the film’s otherwise grounded lyricism. But even these missteps feel like necessary stumbles in a journey so personal it trembles. When Bupe’s voice memo becomes a ghostly soundtrack to the women gathering, it hits like a revelation: they’ve all been silent for so long, their harmony becomes a lament.

This isn’t a homecoming narrative. Shula doesn’t rediscover pride in her roots. She considers setting fire to the tree. Because some family trees don’t need healing. They need to be cut down. Or at the very least, remembered honestly. Nyoni knows that to honor tradition is not always to obey it. Sometimes, it’s to demand more from it.

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” doesn’t give you closure. It gives you a match.

4/5