After we first meet Shula (Susan Chardy), the quietly unbending protagonist of “On Turning into a Guinea Chook,” she is using house from a fancy-dress birthday celebration, dressed in darkish sun shades, a gleaming steel helmet, and a puffy black jumpsuit—it looks as if an inflated trash bag—that engulfs her from the neck down. Some will acknowledge the glance as an homage to Missy Elliott, in particular the tune video for her 1997 solo-single début, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”; others might wonder whether Shula, along with her saggy, birdlike carriage, has already transform a guinea chicken. Both manner, there’s something oddly disquieting about the way in which Shula involves us each disguised and armored, as though she have been guarding the reality of who she is. Chardy’s watchful, fine-grained efficiency is a very powerful to this impact, and it seems to be the important thing to the film. In scene after scene, Shula doesn’t say a lot, however there’s, in nearly each and every body, an unmistakable nervousness in her composure, as though her mere look of calm required a big exertion of will.
It’s overdue at evening, however one thing Shula sees compels her to prevent using, get out of her automotive, and examine. A person lies lifeless within the highway, and it’s in an instant obvious that she paused now not out of interest or fear, however reputation. Positive sufficient, the frame belongs to her fiftysomething uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), a undeniable fact that she registers without a unhappiness or surprise, and, certainly, with a definite deadpan detachment. How may just Shula, on a dim side road at midnight, have laid eyes on a supine, nondescript frame and discovered, in her intestine, precisely who it used to be? The solution is quickly published: Fred used to be a serial sexual predator. This seems to be one thing of an open secret inside Shula’s huge, middle-class circle of relatives, despite the fact that it isn’t, it seems that, a sufficiently critical one to halt the gauntlet of mourning that lies forward. “On Turning into a Guinea Chook” used to be written and directed by means of Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-born British filmmaker, whose circle of relatives moved to Wales when she used to be a kid. Her 2nd characteristic, it’s taut, soaking up, and, at ninety-nine mins, ruthlessly concise. However what it bears witness to, over a number of days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering staying power take a look at, through which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.
Shula grew up right here, in Zambia, however she has handiest lately returned, after a while away. Nyoni’s movie is thus the tale of an surprisingly pained homecoming, of horrible reminiscences faced. Shula used to be abused by means of Fred as a kid; so used to be her cousin Nsansa (a raucous Elizabeth Chisela), who’s as irrepressible and exuberant as Shula is wary and stern. When Nsansa drunkenly recounts the time Fred took her to a resort years previous, she does so with irreverent cackles, mocking his genitalia and implying that he used to be slightly in a position to violating her; handiest later, after sobering up, does she confess the horrible, extra banal fact of what happened. A more youthful cousin, Bupe (Esther Singini), tells her personal long-buried tale of abuse in a heartbreaking cell-phone video, handiest a part of which we see and listen to; later, in a startling formal elision, Bupe’s phrases overlap and merge with Shula’s personal. The purpose isn’t merely that the cousins proportion a painful revel in however that exact testimony has a collective energy. One girl, in talking out, can talk for others as properly.
Had “On Turning into a Guinea Chook” been conceived purely as a drama of unearthed reminiscences, unhealed trauma, and thwarted duty, it could minimize to the bone. However Nyoni is going additional nonetheless. It’s no accident that Shula stocks her given title with the younger protagonist of the director’s robust first characteristic, “I Am Now not a Witch” (2017). The Shula in that film is a teen woman who’s accused of witchcraft and exiled to a far flung “witch camp,” the place she and different imprisoned girls are mistreated, exploited, and placed on show for vacationers, like zoo creatures or carnival freaks. Each movies have been shot by means of the very good cinematographer David Gallego, and in each he invests pictures of accumulated crowds with a peculiarly transfixing rigidity. In “On Turning into a Guinea Chook,” the valuable, anguished intimacies that Shula exchanges along with her cousins are relentlessly pressurized by means of the social tasks and anxieties of the funeral; they’re choked off nearly earlier than they are able to start to take significant root. Amid the busy paintings of grief, the younger girls don’t have any actual time to grieve for themselves.
Nyoni movies the arrangements and rituals with an observational rigor that compels our personal focus. It’s an astonishing spectacle to behold. Kin descend en masse on Shula’s circle of relatives house, which is now briefly a “funeral area”; furnishings is cleared away, and mattresses are introduced in for the ladies, who sleep indoors, whilst the boys arrange camp out of doors. Such gender segregation is a continuing; it falls to the ladies of the home to make the preparations, purchase meals, and cook dinner foods. Amid energy outages (a nod to Zambia’s power disaster) and sudden floods, a whole equipment of mourning kicks into equipment, and Shula and her cousins are amongst its busiest cogs. In a single casually infuriating series, Shula searches desperately for Bupe, gravely curious about her well-being, handiest to be many times distracted by means of older male family who call for that she serve them meals. Additional asserting the overall uselessness of the male intercourse is Shula’s father (Henry B. J. Phiri), who by no means misses a chance to hit his daughter up for cash and turns a in large part deaf ear to any phrase of Fred’s trespasses.
The older girls in Shula’s circle of relatives, regardless of superficial gestures of fortify and compassion, don’t end up a lot better. Shula is all however bullied into submission by means of her aunts, who scold her for having bathed—one thing strictly forbidden till the mourning duration is over—and insist to grasp why she stays dry-eyed within the wake of her uncle’s dying. In those moments, “On Turning into a Guinea Chook” achieves a startling landscape of cross-generational alienation, through which Fred’s abuses are proven to have destroyed any significant connection between moms and daughters, aunts and nieces. Remarkably, Nyoni and Gallego put across this rupture nearly totally via compositional emphasis. Within the early mourning scenes, they use digital camera placement to strategically hide the older girls’s faces and identities, lowering them to an undifferentiated blur of weeping and wailing. Juxtaposed with such a lot performative distress, Shula’s unwavering serenity takes on a steely ethical readability, throwing the absurdity of the entire charade into stark reduction. Even if Shula’s determine is in part obscured, or filmed from at the back of, we will be able to most often inform from the set of her shoulders—Chardy’s clenched frame language is grimly eloquent—exactly what she is pondering and feeling.
One of the crucial movie’s maximum tragic figures is Fred’s meek and traumatized younger widow (Norah Mwansa), who’s handled abominably by means of Shula’s aunts. They accuse her of using Fred to his dying via irresponsibility and forget, they usually try to weaponize this accusation financially, denying her and her family any declare to Fred’s property. If truth be told, the instances of Fred’s dying appear neither ambiguous nor suspicious. It’s implied that he expired at a brothel, most probably mid-coitus, now not a long way from the street the place his frame used to be discovered. Nyoni can have performed “On Turning into a Guinea Chook” as a homicide thriller, a funeral-parlor whodunit; no doubt there’s no scarcity of suspects or motives the place the loathsome Fred is worried. However there are truly handiest two mysteries at play right here: how will Shula and her cousins, amid such a lot pretense, convey the reality to mild? And what does that experience to do with the movie’s eccentric, unforgettable identify?
The 2 solutions are deeply and imaginatively intertwined, and the abnormal importance of the guinea chicken may also be discovered, like the injuries and scars of abuse themselves, deep within the mists of reminiscence. The eerily exciting dénouement will have to be noticed and heard to be believed. Suffice to mention that this Shula is maximum in no way a witch, however by means of the tip there’s no denying that she—and Nyoni—have a profound capability for magic.
