Well it’s an African Festen, isn’t it? I’m going to say immediately what most reviewers seem to get around to saying eventually. But On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is much more than just a dark drama about family secrets coming to light at a family gathering, so memorably wrangled in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film.
The director/writer is Rungano Nyoni, who swept all before her with feature debut I Am Not a Witch in 2017. Also suggesting excellence is the fact that it’s an A24 production, and they are rarely putting a foot wrong at the moment when it comes to intelligent, entertaining and original drama (see The Brutalist, Midsommar, Aftersun and The Whale).
Nyoni is telling two stories here. In one, the Festen-alike top layer – the sudden death of an uncle in mysterious circumstances and the secrets that emerge as his relatives gather to bury him. At a second no-less-fascinating level – a portrait of two versions of Africa rubbing along together slightly uneasily.
Nyoni’s opening shot is a shock, if Africa to you means mud huts and cattle as a measure of wealth. A young woman behind the wheel of a fancy Mercedes driving at night on a well made road in Zambia. Shula (Susan Chardy) is wearing a silver mask and a big balloon dress. It’s a fancy dress outfit of some sort and she’s clearly on the way home from a party.
And then she spots a man on the side of the road. It turns out the man is Shula’s Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Her reaction is odd. She doesn’t seem particularly upset, seems quite blank, in fact. And when Shula’s drunken, party-animal cousin Nsansa turns up, boisterous, larking about with a bit of twerking, Shula won’t let her in the car, won’t even acknowledge she’s there. It’s as if Shula is somewhere else entirely.
Shula’s reaction is eventually explained. And so, in a completely satisfying way, is Nsansa’s behaviour – always loud, always drinking, an eye for the boys – as the two of them form a loose Watson and Holmes investigating duo of sorts, though this film proceeds by tiny forensic scalpel reveals rather than big ta-daas.
Throughout, the two Africas. Shula’s is one of smartphones, Zoom meetings, keto diets and scatter cushions. She’s probably spent time in America or Europe and has learned to be reserved. Nsansa lives to an extent in the older Africa of colourful print clothing and bigger emotions. But behind them is a vast array of aunts and uncles in the extended family, who still properly do things the old way. In the modern building chosen to be the “funeral house” for Uncle Fred, the women arrive shuffling on their knees, wail uncontrollably at the loss of one of their own, and disdain Shula and her fancy new-fangled lifestyle.
Though everyone, Shula apart, is wailing, no one is talking about Fred. No one wants to say what they all know to be true, that he was a predatory serial sexual abuser. Speaking ill of the dead is not the African way. Though in the figure of the guinea fowl – the bird that kicks up a hell of a racket when bad stuff is approaching – there is another African way, we learn at one point, in the film’s only heavy-handed moment.
These competing versions of “the real Africa” remain in tension right to the end, the power of silence versus the cleansing effect of getting things out into the open. Elizabeth Chisala’s Nsansa and Susan Chardy’s Shula represent these two poles without ever descending into caricature. Chisala and Chardy give us believeable characters not placeholders for didacticism.
Weaving through the story and the fantastic performances – the ensemble playing is off the chart, it must be said – is a silver thread of magical realism. Just a hint. Sometimes it’s a figure who seems to have popped up from nowhere. Sometimes it’s an unconventional edit, just enough to unsettle. Nyoni and her DP David Gallego, meanwhile, dance balletically through the confined domestic spaces where masses of relatives swirl as the days-long funeral ceremony plays out.
It’s technically virtuosic, to add to the thematic richness, the superb characterisation and acting and that Festen-esque ugliness lurking behind it all.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
