No Revelations for the Rebellious

Ghosts—whether trapped in our heads or in our houses—offer data and invite the sinking recognition that all hauntings inevitably propose: this world may be physical, but there exists no place on earth where the living may escape their buried. How apt, then, that this tale of women choking on their own silence is ushered in by the departed but hardly dormant architect of their pain. Driving home one night from a fancy-dress party, clad in a glittering helmet and silky black bubble suit (in a glaring gesture to the film’s curious title), Shula, played by Susan Chardy, discovers her uncle Fred’s fresh corpse on the road. The peculiar circumstances of his death—the mysterious cause and manner of it, that he is found very near a brothel—do not so much alarm Shula’s ostensibly matriarchal family as unite them in calculated concealment (not for the first time, it turns out) of their brother’s vices. 

This devoted silence into which Shula is unceremoniously corralled—an extension of past disavowals—threatens to shatter the precarious fellowship of the funeral proceedings that follow. A nearly intolerable tension simmers as they go about their traditional Bemba mourning rites, which include misoa, a collective expression of bereavement. We are transported, in the smooth blink of a cut, to a scene of cacophonous wailing: Shula sits huddled among her family with a steely, faraway gaze in defiant silence amid the outcry. One aunt leans over to envelop Shula in her stifling embrace, only to chide her niece irritably, “You’re embarrassing us.” We see suddenly how her refusal to speak marks a pesky violation of a barely whispered contract, one that relies on preserving a social order that forgives men all manner of sins, leaving those they have harmed at risk of alienation for daring to resist. Even before we learn the depth and, indeed, the scale of Fred’s transgressions, we have a sense of the broader case the Zambian-born Welsh filmmaker will mount: these everyday betrayals, a devastating social tax, amount to an ever-festering psychic wound that cannot be healed in seclusion.

With the aid of Colombian director of photography David Gallego, Nyoni unflinchingly captures the brimming tumult of these domestic sequences: the hasty preparation and distribution of meals, the clamor of too many bodies and their persistent requests, the intensity of relentless proximity. Perhaps few women will find themselves unfamiliar with such a chillingly precise portrait of gendered labor. But something discernibly sinister veils these family scenes, blanketed in a waking dread that heralds long unfolding tragedies and a swelling rage that demands relief.

Certain patterns have emerged since the filmmaker’s bold debut feature I Am Not a Witch (2017), about a 9-year-old girl also called Shula (which means “to be uprooted”)—certainly a kindred figure—banished to a Zambian witch camp. That film also concerns how readily the very societies that depend upon their exploit dispose of girls and women for any perceived rebellion or difference. In Guinea Fowl, like its predecessor, Nyoni sleekly weds melodrama and comedy with the horror tropes and impressionist splendor she visibly favors. Here that entails dusky night scenes, fluorescent red lights, and in one stunning if harrowing set piece, a flooded dormitory awash in cavernous umbra. Gallego’s striking compositions with Lucrecia Dalt’s crisp, percussive score and Olivier Dandré’s elegant sound design all plunge viewers into the emotional purgatory where Shula finds her cousins Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) and the teenage Bupe (Esther Singini) as mired as she is. Nsansa flails in a state of arrested maturity, her beaded bangs and high ponytail the crowning emblem of her protracted girlishness, while Bupe sinks disastrously into despair. Shula remains remote, not quite passive, but a little too accommodating: always willing, for example, to lend her useless father money, knowing he will never return it or any other favor, or otherwise unwilling to refuse her mother, even after Shula discovers her tragic, ongoing betrayal. In fact, much of her character is etched in these early moments of withholding, strangled silences—like a lump in the throat—conveyed by Chardy with a mute, striking eloquence; for every time she dares to map the past, her parents fail her. Revealingly, when everyone else in her family refuses, only Shula is moved enough to cook for Fred’s widow Chichi (an unforgettable Norah Mwansa), spurned for the crime of surviving him. Indeed, Shula’s compassion distinguishes her, but there is also something transparently lonesome about her, before she finds solidarity in Nsansa and Bupe.

This is not a story of revelations: no one in the family is under any illusion about the man Fred was. Instead, we have a layered—as damning as it is restorative—account of how women have endured this patriarchal project and what possibilities might yet be available to them, where something like justice or the road to it might be found. We know women have traditionally done the cumbersome work of kinkeeping, the thankless social maintenance that keeps families afloat. This consequence of the core disparity in gendered labor poses even darker implications for victims of abuse. For they too are tasked, implicitly or otherwise, to sacrifice themselves at the altar of familial and communal security. The only path forward, perhaps the only remedy left to them, is their voice. Finally, Nyoni’s women give shape to their pain and bear witness for each other, an act as triumphant as the bird call that closes the film.