Birdsong: "On Becoming a Guinea Fowl"

On the evidence of her first two features, the Welsh-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni's talents stretch far beyond a gift for leftfield titling: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, her follow-up to 2017's terrific I Am Not a Witch, is further distinguished by unusual images and unexpected lines of narrative approach. The new film unfolds in Zambia, in itself an underfilmed location, and for some while it unfolds at a Zambian roadside, where Shula (Susan Chardy) has parked up upon discovering her uncle's lifeless body on a trail outside a brothel. We initially wonder whether this will be a rare entry in that darkly comic subgenre where a corpse proves central to proceedings (cf. The Trouble with Harry, Weekend at Bernie's), but for Nyoni, the stiff is really just an extraordinary way to bring an extended family together. Shula's bibulous sister Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) is first to arrive on the scene, bogling around the body to Afrobeats, and before long, everybody's showing up at the family home: myriad aunties, the girls' grief-stricken mother, the dead man's widow, those who knew the deceased and those who suffered at his hands, for the inevitable commiserations are soon mingling with ugly rumours and allegations of abuse. We wait for it to settle down and to take definitive form, but - to its considerable credit - the film never does; instead, at various points, it resembles a homecoming drama, a whodunnit (because almost everyone has their reasons for wanting Uncle Fred dead), a study in trauma, a #MeToo movie with the dials cranked up to eleven, and - looser and more impressionistic still - a treatise on how we live with those secrets that others would rather take with them to the grave. OBAGF is a little of all these movies, in the end; its title derives from Shula's memories of kids-telly schooling on the importance of having a sound warning system, but it also speaks to an idea of shapeshifting that informs the film entire.

It's a lively one, in other words. The mode is broadly realist - actual locations, inhabited by local performers and non-professionals - but scarcely a scene proceeds in the expected manner. Shula - the sensible one here, to whom our sympathies are quickly drawn - discovers the body on the way back from a fancy dress party, which means she's seen standing over the corpse in a fatsuit of some kind. The Zambian equivalent of sitting shiva offers an opportunity for the women of this tribe to compare gel nails, gossip and get thoroughly sloshed. (One alternative - if greatly more prosaic - title: Drunk Mourning.) One reason Nyoni has been embraced as such a hope is that her first two films have done more than most to reroute the cinema and knock its constituent scenes and stories off the beaten path that has become such a chore to travel down in recent years. Her tactics here even deviate from those of her previous film, which was driven above all else by its striking imagery. Guinea Fowl has the occasional off-kilter image (that fatsuit; a flooded lodging house), but it's chiefly powered by decentered storytelling that kept reminding me of Robert Altman: ever-swelling ensemble, overlapping dialogue, wry humour. Yet this 21st century Altman is also capable of seriousness whenever she's addressing the abuse at this story's heart. When Nsansa describes her experiences with Uncle Fred, it explains why she drinks, and also why so many of the womenfolk here are seen staggering around, caught between grief and giggly relief. The liveliness is sometimes indistinguishable from volatility: the power's out, the laughter's manic, the emotion high. Sometimes it's plain stressy: on one level, this is the tale of a woman trying to get through a funeral without shouting "dude was a sex pest" at the top of her lungs, much as some are going to have to hold their tongues at the Trump inauguration next week. Narratively, it can seem haphazard - but it's clearly been pushed that way by these dazed characters, and when at the last Shula finds a different way to communicate her concerns, she's following the lead of her idiosyncratic director. Compressed into an intense 99 minutes, it's a lot - even the film's most fervent admirers will find stretches of it confounding - but, again, it is for these characters, too; and far better a filmmaker give us a lot to unpack and process than - as has become more common - nothing like enough.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is now playing in selected cinemas.