Editor’s Word: This evaluation was initially revealed through the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. A24 opens “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” in theaters Friday, March 7, 2025.
Many years of mediocre Sundance motion pictures — and a few superb ones, too — have conditioned us to anticipate sure issues from culturally particular dramas about younger individuals who return residence from the large metropolis and discover themselves struggling to reconcile fashionable id with household custom. These characters invariably really feel at odds with the heritage that solid them, solely to find one thing important and profound concerning the previous they have been so fast to depart behind. On the finish of the story, they return to their fast-paced lives in London or L.A. or wherever with a brand new sense of self-possession — one which displays the grace and energy they’ve inherited from the generations who got here earlier than them.
Rungano Nyoni’s lucid and incandescently livid “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” is a stiff center finger to such wishful pondering. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that’s positioned at a well-trafficked however poorly maintained intersection between international influences and Bemba mores, the “I Am Not a Witch” filmmaker’s second function tells the story of a Westernized younger lady who’s compelled to carry her prolonged household tree collectively by its roots throughout a disaster that leaves her wanting to tear the entire thing out of the earth along with her naked fingers.
There are moments of magnificence and resilience to be discovered amid the buried ache she uncovers alongside the way in which, however don’t be fooled by the heroine’s Zoom conferences along with her British co-workers or her unhappy penchant for American life hack podcasts: The longer term may not have all of the solutions, however it’s the previous that she gained’t be capable of forgive. Which leads us to a different fascinating manner that Nyoni manages to subvert certainly one of latest cinema’s most calcified sub-genres: The protagonist’s household could also be her biggest connection to her cultural reminiscence, however their eagerness to forgive the previous in the end requires them to overlook it.
Whereas sharply essential of how even essentially the most cathartic facets of Bemba’s matrilineal society have been hijacked by patriarchal Christian values, “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” resists the temptation to pit one in opposition to the opposite in an effort to rating simple factors. Quite the opposite, this dreamlike however deeply unnerving movie aspires to a a lot thornier dilemma, and to a dramatic query so troublesome to reply that Nyoni can’t even ask it with out dishonest: How do you discover the phrases to talk up in opposition to a convention of silence?
Silence seems to be a pure response to Shula (a stoic however trembling Susan Chardy). It’s her first response when she finds her Uncle Fred’s physique mendacity in the course of the highway one night time as she drives again from a dressing up occasion at a pal’s home. His corpse is down the road from a brothel, and under a billboard commercial for a priest who guarantees miracles and deliverance. It’s doable that Shula hesitates due to how absurd it will look if she referred to as the cops whereas wearing a parachute bodysuit and a disco ball headdress, however the shocked depth of Shula’s quiet suggests a extra severe type of dilemma.
Your first guess will most likely be that Uncle Fred did one thing terrible to Shula when she was a baby, and your first guess will most likely be proper. Much less apparent to us — not less than till Shula’s drunken cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) exhibits up on the scene with an analogous lack of concern — is that she may not have been his solely sufferer.
In hindsight, that ugly fact might have been apparent to Shula as nicely, however it appears as if that is the primary time that she’s permitting herself to acknowledge it. And so Shula finds herself reckoning with the total extent of Uncle Fred’s crimes concurrently she permits her residence to turn into a brief shrine to his reminiscence. Dozens of ladies from her prolonged household spill into the kitchen on their fingers and knees — as a result of “dying comes crawling” — whereas their husbands sit outdoors and wait to be fed. Uncle Fred’s alarmingly younger widow takes shelter in a room upstairs, just for the deceased’s ultra-militant sister to demand everybody to disclaim any charity to a girl who didn’t preserve Fred alive and in good well being. What’s extra, Shula’s aunt will insist that her household seize possession of the widow’s home, and probably her kids together with it.
Nyoni illustrates the finer factors of Bemba society’s mourning course of by a harshly unflattering mild, as Uncle Fred’s sister calls for satisfaction from each potential second of grace. So do the lads in Shula’s household, who preserve to the periphery of the movie however nonetheless handle to exert their will (an extension of the pall that Uncle Fred manages to solid over this story from the afterlife). They sit across the outer ring of the isambo lyamfwa — a big assembly supposed for mourners to clear the air between them and permit the useless to depart in peace — and switch it right into a hostile takeover of Uncle Frank’s property.
It’s however certainly one of many ways in which Shula’s household manages to pervert the fantastic thing about their customs. Bemba tradition believes that each one persons are born good, and that solely their goodness needs to be remembered after they go; a pleasant thought which may hit a bit totally different for anybody who can’t overlook the deceased’s badness fairly so simply.
Shula has all an excessive amount of firm in that class, and “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” is at its most arrestingly self-conflicted as she discovers that her trauma is extra extensively shared than her frustration at protecting it secret. That discovery hinges on Shula’s youthful cousin Bupe, a school scholar whose means to aim suicide one night time and sport a body-snatched smile the following speaks to how reticent Fred’s victims are to disrupt the household order, simply because it crystallizes why they have been those he selected to focus on. “He’s useless now, so it’s OK,” Bupe smiles, as if she really believes that, however we don’t have to see one of many film’s clunky dream sequences in an effort to acknowledge her self-delusion.
A few of Nyoni’s methods may be uncomfortably facile for the load they’re meant to hold, particularly these which betray an absence of religion within the Haneke-like icing of her framing, and its means to mine actual horror from the stuff of home sterility. The semi-frequent look of Shula’s youthful self seems like an apparition from a lesser telling of this story, too neatly illustrating the presence of the previous, whereas the climactic scene that is sensible of the film’s title underlines the occasional disconnect between the efficiency of Nyoni’s metaphors and the clunkiness of their execution.
On the similar time, nevertheless, a number of of her boldest decisions are equally essential to the movie’s final energy. Probably the most breathtaking passage of all begins with the audio of Bupe’s would-be suicide video, just for a easy change in perspective to devastatingly slam residence that the ladies in Shula’s household have been taught to say nothing as a result of in any other case they’d all communicate in unison.
“Keep quiet,” Shula’s mother cautions her. She insists that it’s for the great of the household. However how many individuals should preserve a secret earlier than hiding the reality turns into extra disruptive than bringing it to mild? There’s no easy equation to calculate that, however “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” invitations Shula to do the mathematics in its most affecting moments — so as to add up the ages of Uncle Fred’s kids, or rely the variety of ladies who collect within the pantry to allow them to sing collectively as one.
These are alternatives for brand spanking new harm and much-needed therapeutic alike, however they’re by no means candy sufficient to disguise the cruelty that impressed them into being, by no means cathartic sufficient to cue the proper indie pop track and ship everybody residence with some hardwon new energy. They burn like a flame that has an excessive amount of kindling to ever be extinguished by itself, and the scarring energy of Nyoni’s movie ignites from Shula’s eventual realization that she would quite torch her household to the bottom than allow them to overlook what occurred. In any case, what’s custom if not a shared reminiscence?
Grade: B+
“On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. A24 releases it in theaters Friday, March 7, 2025.