Rungano Nyoni’s second feature, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, is now streaming on HBO Max. The film, a Zambian drama that blends realist scenes with hallucinatory passages, centers on a woman who confronts the constraints of family ritual and the culture of silence that surrounds an alleged sexual abuser.
The story follows Shula, played by Susan Chardy in her first screen role, who returns home after the death of her uncle, known in the film as Uncle Fred. The narrative traces the days of mourning that overtake her middle‑class household: extended‑family women rearrange furniture, perform ritualized wailing, and police an acceptable expression of grief while the men remain largely on the margins. As the family enacts those rites, private conversations and a struck‑through history surface, including accusations that the dead man had sexually abused relatives. Those allegations are rarely acknowledged openly, and the film makes the unseen restraints of tradition its central conflict.
Nyoni, who is Zambian‑Welsh and wrote and directed the film, frames the story around the figure of the guinea fowl — a sub‑Saharan bird whose alarm call signals nearby predators — using it as an extended metaphor for communities that lack comparable warning mechanisms. The film’s formal choices include moments of surreal detachment in which Shula appears outside herself, sequences that a reviewer for Decider described as hallucinogenic. Those stylistic elements punctuate scenes of domestic choreography: cooking, serving, wailing and the enforcement of custom.
Elizabeth Chisela plays Nsansa, Shula’s cousin, and Esther Singini portrays Bupe, a younger relative who appears to attempt suicide and leaves behind a recorded message linking her supposed act to the uncle’s conduct. Much of the film’s tension derives from how female relatives negotiate grief rituals — public, performative moaning versus private, anguished conversation — and from the community’s reluctance to confront the alleged abuse. Men in the film are presented largely as peripheral figures who benefit from the social order the rituals uphold.
Critical reaction has highlighted the film’s measured, often bleak approach to its subject. In a review published Sept. 9, 2025, John Serba of Decider called On Becoming a Guinea Fowl “a powerful drama” and recommended it for streaming, noting the film’s “distinctive voice and vision.” Serba praised Chardy’s quiet, controlled performance and the way Nyoni stages the generational divide between women who feel bound by custom and those who want to challenge it. The review contrasted Nyoni’s restrained approach with more overtly vengeful feminist narratives, describing this film as a quieter, more ambiguous work that resists tidy closure.
Nyoni first drew international attention with her debut feature, I Am Not a Witch, and several critics and observers have drawn comparisons between the two films’ focus on ritualized gender roles and their use of surreal imagery. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl similarly interrogates rituals that both codify and conceal power, asking why a community might continue to observe customs that protect abusers while silencing victims.
The film’s tone is somber rather than sensational, and its most charged dramatic moments are earned through accumulation: small, domestic details that reveal the social logic sustaining silence. The script stages private exchanges in which women admit fear or anger, set against scenes of performative mourning that emphasize conformity. Nyoni’s direction isolates the rituals’ mechanics — the removal of furniture, the insistence that a mourner not bathe — to show how custom organizes and polices behavior.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl also foregrounds generational tension. Elder women in the household occupy a conflicted position: custodians of tradition who sometimes privately express regret or complicity but who say they are powerless to change custom. The film allows those contradictions to stand without offering a programmatic solution; its final sequences, like several earlier set pieces, privilege mood and implication over explicit resolution.
The film’s arrival on HBO Max expands the platform’s international drama lineup and continues a recent trend of streaming services acquiring regional works that engage global audiences through local stories. Nyoni’s film will likely prompt further conversation about how ritual, silence and law intersect in settings where social cohesion is prized and allegations against the powerful are stigmatized or suppressed.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is available to stream on HBO Max. Press coverage and reviews emphasize its focus on gendered power structures and the social mechanisms that protect alleged abusers; the film’s narrative approach and performances have attracted particular attention for their restraint and emotional specificity.