On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to I Am Not a Witch, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is furious, heartbreaking and totally bewitching

Film Review by Joe Creely | 02 Dec 2024
  • On Becoming A Guinea Fowl
Film title: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Director: Rungano Nyoni
Starring: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Henry B.J. Phiri
Release date: 6 Dec
Certificate: 12A

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl opens with Shula (Chardy) driving down a dark road in Zambia wearing headwear straight out of a 2009 Lady Gaga lookbook. When she finds her uncle's body dumped on the verge she is inscrutably unmoved, and as we follow her through the next few days as her family reunites for the funeral, her reaction becomes increasingly complex as long-buried secrets begin to come to light.

In its opening stages, Rungano Nyoni's film suggests something familiar: a generational culture clash film. But she tears up this trope with furious intensity, refusing to let any issue be simple. Each character in this family is dense with complexities and implicit connections to the film’s central traumas. Every familial interaction – which at times are incredibly funny, and at others slyly vicious – pulsates with hidden depths.

This pinpoint balance of tone makes the moments where On Becoming a Guinea Fowl loses its nerve all the more frustrating. Dream sequences and flashbacks often feel like they have wandered in from a less interesting film, one less prepared to gamble on the audience's ability to read into its usually expertly measured ambiguity. But beyond plotting, it is the atmosphere that makes the film soar. Hovering somewhere between Weerasethakul and Haneke in its tranquil yet unnerving iciness, the film comes to a head in its searing finale which unleashes a dormant intensity that cements this as one of the finest cinematic explorations of trauma in recent times.


Released 6 Dec by Picturehouse Entertainment; certificate 12A