On Becoming a Guinea Fowl: Rungano Nyoni finds elegant magic in the most painful places

A woman in a glittering futuristic mask pulls over her car on a road with no life, human or otherwise, in sight. Her only company is a man’s dead body, laid face down on the pavement. She pulls out her phone and utters with complete dispassion, “Dad, it’s Shula. I’ve found Uncle Fred’s body on Kulu Road.”

The start of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a confounding set-up, suggesting what lies ahead could be science fiction, horror or melodrama. But what slowly unspools speaks to a more tragically human and explicable set of circumstances. Shula’s mask and voluminous black ensemble are down to a costume party where she was dressed as Missy Elliott in the video for her 1997 song ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’; the area is deathly quiet because she is on a remote road travelling from the hub of the Zambian Bemba people to her hotel in a swankier area of town; and she cares little for this man’s passing because, to her mind, he is better off dead.

The film follows Shula (Susan Chardy), her perpetually inebriated cousin Nsansa (a delightful Elizabeth Chisela), her family and the wider community going through the motions of grief for a man that no one will miss. It’s not so much the extent of the violent havoc he wreaked upon so many members of this family, but that he was a pitiful figure who, with little effort or strategy, was able to abuse with impunity anyone he had access to. Beyond the performative grief that takes place in the home hosting the funeral for the next few days, we know that this is all a farcical, shallow bereavement: as Nsansa says, between swigs, “Why are they mourning Uncle Fred like he was an angel, not a pervert?”

Even once the futuristic costumes and Kafkaesque inefficiency around collecting the body are moved past, a different form of light surrealism comes to the fore. The performance of grief becomes a disquieting artifice, and the unwavering formality around Zambian funerals increasingly untethered from the reality of the dead man’s legacy. Nyoni’s and cinematographer David Gallego’s images are made even more dreamlike by the near-perpetual night, each moment lit by the sapphire blue of the moon, where the light itself seems to dance along each surface like billowing silk. Such moments are intercut by the glaring primary colours of an old children’s television programme called Farm Club to which Shula’s memory keeps returning – in particular an episode about guinea fowl.

Chardy is transfixing despite having the unenviable task of performing the taciturn Shula, who attempts to numb herself to the surrounding cacophony of emotions. Her spirit is troubled by the boundaries of respectability, suppressed trauma and a pervasive sense of disappointment in the world around her. Much like the Welsh-Zambian Nyoni, she has a foot in two worlds, going from international video calls for work to being told by her over-bearing aunties that it’s improper to shower when in formal mourning for a member of their family, however noxious they may have been. The story feels closer to home than Nyoni’s much-praised debut I Am Not A Witch (2017), which saw a younger protagonist – also named Shula – navigating coming of age in a Zambian village where she has been accused of being a witch. Both films have ethereal poetry to them and expose how even outwardly matriarchal societies reinforce a patriarchal status quo, but On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a more formidable work. Even with such a reticent figure at its centre, the generational, spiritual and cultural divides between Shula and the Bemba community matriarchs are expressed with more clarity.

As the film moves forward, the extent of Uncle Fred’s poisonous legacy and the systems that enabled it come into focus. Despite the dark subject matter, it’s a strikingly funny piece of work. Nsansa’s dark one-liners are not comic relief – they mark her out as a truth-teller whose gallows humour is born from seeing this world for what it is.

As more and more of Fred’s misdeeds are exposed, the lesson seems to be to not dredge up the past: as Shula’s father asks her, “Do you want to dig up a corpse and confront it?” But there’s catharsis and levity in finally being able to dance, metaphorically, upon Uncle Fred’s grave. As the film ends, all that seems so strange and fantastical in its opening moments has been demystified, replaced by the elegant magic of Nyoni’s storytelling.

► On Becoming a Guinea Fowl arrives in UK cinemas 6 December.