When we first meet Shula (Susan Chardy), the quietly unbending protagonist of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” she is driving home from a fancy-dress party, wearing dark shades, a gleaming metal helmet, and a puffy black jumpsuit—it looks like an inflated trash bag—that engulfs her from the neck down. Some will recognize the look as an homage to Missy Elliott, specifically the music video for her 1997 solo-single début, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”; others may wonder if Shula, with her baggy, birdlike carriage, has already become a guinea fowl. Either way, there is something oddly disquieting about the way Shula comes to us both disguised and armored, as if she were guarding the truth of who she is. Chardy’s watchful, fine-grained performance is crucial to this effect, and it turns out to be the key to the movie. In scene after scene, Shula doesn’t say much, but there is, in practically every frame, an unmistakable anxiety in her composure, as if her mere appearance of calm required a major exertion of will.It’s late at night, but something Shula sees compels her to stop driving, get out of her car, and investigate. A man lies dead in the road, and it’s immediately apparent that she paused not out of curiosity or concern, but recognition. Sure enough, the body belongs to her fiftysomething uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), a fact that she registers with no sadness or shock, and, indeed, with a certain deadpan detachment. How could Shula, on a dim street in the dead of night, have laid eyes on a supine, nondescript body and realized, in her gut, exactly who it was? The answer is soon revealed: Fred was a serial sexual predator. This turns out to be something of an open secret within Shula’s large, middle-class family, although it is not, apparently, a sufficiently serious one to halt the gauntlet of mourning that lies ahead. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-born British filmmaker, whose family moved to Wales when she was a child. Her second feature, it is taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. But what it bears witness to, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance test, in which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.
Shula grew up here, in Zambia, but she has only recently returned, after some time away. Nyoni’s film is thus the story of an unusually pained homecoming, of terrible memories confronted. Shula was abused by Fred as a child; so was her cousin Nsansa (a raucous Elizabeth Chisela), who is as irrepressible and exuberant as Shula is cautious and stern. When Nsansa drunkenly recounts the time Fred took her to a lodge years earlier, she does so with irreverent cackles, mocking his genitalia and implying that he was barely capable of violating her; only later, after sobering up, does she confess the terrible, more banal reality of what occurred. A younger cousin, Bupe (Esther Singini), tells her own long-buried story of abuse in a heartbreaking cell-phone video, only part of which we see and hear; later, in a startling formal elision, Bupe’s words overlap and merge with Shula’s own. The point is not simply that the cousins share a painful experience but that individual testimony has a collective power. One woman, in speaking out, can speak for others as well.
Had “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” been conceived purely as a drama of unearthed memories, unhealed trauma, and thwarted accountability, it would cut to the bone. But Nyoni goes further still. It’s no coincidence that Shula shares her given name with the young protagonist of the director’s powerful first feature, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017). The Shula in that movie is an adolescent girl who is accused of witchcraft and exiled to a remote “witch camp,” where she and other imprisoned women are mistreated, exploited, and put on display for tourists, like zoo creatures or carnival freaks. Both films were shot by the superb cinematographer David Gallego, and in both he invests shots of gathered crowds with a peculiarly transfixing tension. In “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the precious, anguished intimacies that Shula exchanges with her cousins are relentlessly pressurized by the social obligations and anxieties of the funeral; they’re choked off almost before they can begin to take meaningful root. Amid the busy work of grief, the young women have no real time to grieve for themselves.