Uncle Fred is dead. That’s how Shula finds him, flat on his back in the middle of the road at night, no sign of a struggle or an accident. But Shula’s unwillingness to get out of the car isn’t just because it’s an empty road, just across from a brothel, on a country road in Zambia at night.
From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen. She’s not loud or forceful, but completely at odds with her environment. She appears on this quiet Zambian highway dressed in a Party City version of Missy Elliott’s inflatable suit and bejeweled mask/helmet from the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” and even when she starts wearing her daily attire she is clearly not like the rest of her family. The men are all dilettantes and drunks, as summed up by her absentee father (Phiri), who seems to live at a party and is only available to her as a voice on a phone. It’s her mother (Naulapwa) and the other older women of the extended family, the innumerable Aunties, who rule the roost through emotional blackmail and harsh enforcement of social norms.
Shula is not like them; she lives in a modern apartment away from the family estate with a job transcribing Zoom meetings for foreign businesses. As they drag her back into the fold, those Aunties become increasingly terrifying, and by using non-professional actors for much of the cast Nyoni gives a brutally restrained edge to the naturalism of their performances. With every quiet suggestion and reminder of polite behavior, their intentions in having Shula toe the line clearer and more disturbing.
Shula’s also different from her cousins, party animal Nsansa (the fantastically over-the-top Chisela) and college student Bupe (Singini), who seems to be sacrificing her studies and partying a little too hard herself. Shula’s disassociation comes on her own terms, through near-real dream sequences given unnerving life by cinematographer David Gallego (Embrace of the Serpent, Rebel Ridge). Still, Nyoni’s subdued but savage attack on intergenerational sin and subservience soon reveals how much the three younger women have in common.
The ridiculousness of that opening scene, of Shula dressed like an American rap star as if that protects her, parlays into an absurdist streak that runs through Guinea Fowl. Yet this is no comedy. Instead, Nyoni lets that absurdity curdle as Shula, who is already an unwilling participant in these customs, becomes more determined to end this charade. There’s no Hollywood-style cathartic eruption or speechifying. Instead, Nyoni slowly elucidates upon that enigmatic title, and the seemingly obtuse metaphor of the guinea fowl.
Nyoni’s first feature, I Am Not a Witch, approached the universality of the oppression of women through the culturally specific lens of modern witch trials. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is more universal and less bound to Zambia. That’s not because everyone goes to a funeral, sooner or later, but because it feels like every family has an Uncle Fred, the one everyone talks about but no one does anything about. His sins may become more apparent as the funeral rituals continue, but Nyoni’s more interested in the complicity of the Aunties. You’re never supposed to speak ill of the dead, but what if no one spoke up when they were alive?
The final image is no less surreal than that opening shot of Shula as Missy Elliott. Yet by that moment Nyoni has subtly immersed the audience and her protagonist in dark and furious currents that were always beneath the still surface. The detached woman emerges as Clytemnestra, and her wrath, though yet to come, will be deserved.
This article appears in March 21 • 2025.
