‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' review: A family funeral digs up a history of hidden trauma

Chicago Tribune

14-03-2025

Wherever it takes place, whoever's life has ended, a funeral is a kind of collective memory bank. No two memories of the deceased, spoken or unspoken, work the same way. But a person's life, and its ripple effects, have a way of lingering.
Delicate but fierce, 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' is the second feature from the Zambian-born, Welsh-raised writer-director Rungano Nyoni. As both participant and observer, like its protagonist, the film contends with many shades of anguish, in a story about an extended Zambian family mourning the death of a man known to all as Uncle Fred. In a steady, enveloping rhythm, with disarming slivers of sly humor, Nyoni asks a question without a pat answer: Can a dishonorable corpse be honored by those in attendance, if most of the mourners deny or wave away certain shared memories, like smoke from a dying fire?
Driving home alone from a costume party, still in her Missy Elliott mask and headgear from the '90s hit 'The Rain,' Shula sees something at the roadside before we, the audience, see it as well. It is the body of her Uncle Fred.
Shula (played by Susan Chardy) responds by not responding. She's either in stoic shock or the throes of something more inward. Along the same stretch of Zambian road stumbles Shula's cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), seemingly worlds apart from Shula in her boisterous, presently drunken state.
These two women serve as our entryway to the eventual marathon of a ceremonial family gathering. Shula joins the other women (always and only women) in the funeral preparations, the cooking, the serving, the ingrained, subservient nods. There's another cultural factor at work here. As the mourning rituals get underway, and Fred's relatives fill the humble house and yard, Shula and her cousins find themselves receding as adults and reverting, subtly, to their younger, compliant selves in that universal way of grown children re-entering the orbit of family.
Clearly Shula has much on her mind. 'Guinea Fowl' is about how she finds the courage to talk about how Uncle Fred sexually abused her when she was a child, and with whom she feels safe in that spilled secret. She was not the only one. How many knew what was happening?
Uncle Fred also left behind a much younger widow and several children; Shula's extended clan holds the widow (Norah Mwansa) responsible for her wastrel husband's ignoble death, not far from a brothel he frequented. Much of the film deals with how Fred's modest estate will be settled, and parceled out — and whether his hungry family will get anything, in the end, to make up for what the widow owes Fred's blood relatives in this circumstance.
'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,' which shrewdly delays its title's meaning until the last possible minute, proceeds from ritualistic detail to detail, as part of the natural flow of things. Some of the mourners enter the house of mourning walking on their knees, singing a song about how death 'comes crawling' and the bereaved should do likewise. As the chicken on the grill outside sizzles away in the evening, there's a scene where Shula, looking for a missing relative, keeps getting interrupted by male mourners placing their dinner orders. The movie's subtle dramatics (too subtle for some, maybe, but whatever) create an ecosystem for our own exploration.
Director Nyoni's 2017 debut feature, 'I Am Not a Witch,' announced a significant talent already formed, and driven by what keeps women confined, and by what cultural traditions of repression. Her cinematographer on that film and this one, David Gallego, has a supple eye for both indoor and outdoor shadows and light, and expressively emotional color. 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' takes its time and maintains a tight lid on Shula's emotions, not because it's a setup for some sort of explosion (though that comes, in its way) but because it's the authentic choice for a tamped-down psyche in search of a release valve. Nyoni is not into screeds or simple messaging. This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.
And it's a 2025 highlight.
'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
Running time: 1:39
How to watch: Premieres Fri. March 14 at Music Box Theatre, AMC River East and Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville