On Becoming a Guinea Fowl review – Rungano Nyoni’s strange, intense tale of sexual abuse

Cannes film festival
Nyoni uses unsettlingly playful surrealism in this account of a malign uncle and the family mythmaking that effaces his crimes

Rungano Nyoni is the Zambian-Welsh film-maker who in 2017 had an arthouse smash with her debut, the witty and distinctive misogyny fable I Am Not a Witch. Her new film is an oblique, intensely self-aware and often seriocomically strange family drama about sexual abuse. Its final moments give us something of the magic realism that the title hints at, but its playfully and startlingly surreal images are perhaps at odds with the fundamental seriousness of what this film is about. While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

On a dark road in Zambia, Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving a car, wearing a strange sci-fi outfit. The reason for her clothes will be given later, but they give a sheen of dreamlike unreality to what happens next: she stops the car, and gets out to look at a dead body by the roadside, lying weirdly calmly, staring sightlessly upward. It is Shula’s Uncle Fred who has perhaps been dragged to this spot by the sex-worker employees of the nearby brothel where he had probably suffered a fatal seizure.

Continue reading…