Birds of a Feather Must Flock Together in Obliquely Dark A24 Drama

DIRECTED BY RUNGANO NYONI/2025

There’s a dead man in the road.  Shula, a clearly cynical twenty-something who happens to be parked right there, knows the identity of the cadaver.  Yet, she’s less than motivated to engage with the situation.  Maybe a phone call to a family member about it.  But don’t expect her to ruffle her oversized bird costume’s feathers over this development.

Two things… 

1. The expired man in the road is Shula’s uncle, whom she clearly has a low opinion of.  As the film advances, we’ll learn exactly why she’s so jaded about him, and that she’s not alone in her distain of him.  

2. I didn’t really know the deal with the bird suit, either.  Maybe I missed an explanation, beyond it being a kind of direct relation to the film’s title.  The costume is comedically poofy, reducing Shula’s head to an undersized dot top and center.  There’s a bejeweled helmet that she wears with it, albeit briefly.  In a remarkably grounded film, this outlandish element is something of a sore thumb.

For a bit there, it was looking to me like British actress and filmmaker, Rungano Nyoni’s PG-13 Bemba-language film might be going the way of certain other contemporary indies, leaning inordinately into its scant oddities.  Nyoni, however, is playing the long game.  Perceived eccentricities eventually re-emerge as poignant symbolism, even foreshadowing of sorts.  It’s in this storytelling, coupled with the resonant performances of the entire cast, that On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is revealed to be a darkly powerful film.

Susan Chardy’s performance as Shula may at first seem to be one overwrought with emotional barriers, but it is in fact a richly layered accompaniment.  As everyone in her typical middle-class Zambian family navigates the traditional days-long funeral customs for the dead uncle, we come to know the man better than we’d come to know living characters in lesser films.  In the emotional triggering of young relative Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) and the reconciliations of Shula, it is obvious early on that the deceased was a serial abuser of young girls in the family.  Sadly, none of the older generation cares to hear of it.  “Now is not the time.”

While On Becoming a Guinea Fowl succeeds in perpetrating an assumed aesthetic of a Zambian film of little means, the reality is that A24, BBC Films, and the large British distribution company Fremantle pooled resources to fund this production.  Nothing wrong with that; it simply bears mentioning that this isn’t necessarily the scrappy 100% South African import that we might we assume it to be.  To what extent it may be comparable to, say, the notoriously incognito 2014 “foreign film” A Girl Walks Hone Alone at Night (an ostensibly Iranian film shot in the U.S.), I have been unable to determine.

As the funeral customs drag on, true colors begin to be revealed.  What does becoming a Guinea fowl have to do with any of this?  I suppose that’s a spoiler, so it shan’t be revealed here.  I’ll simply say that birds of a feather must flock together.  That goes a long way when it comes to getting flocked over by varying degrees by one’s own close friends and family.  The vulnerable must have a means to sounding an alarm.