ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL – Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film – is a skilfully constructed balance of tone and expectations. The film finds reason in oddities, truths in ambiguities, and joy despite trauma, all underscored by a superb performance from Susan Chardy.

The film opens with Shula (Susan Chardy) stopping her car, exiting it in an elaborate fancy dress, and finding a dead body in the road, one oddly stiff and straight as a board. Stoically, she calls her father, whereupon it becomes apparent that the corpse is that of her Uncle Fred. As she remonstrates with her father on the phone as he asks for money, her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) appears as if from nowhere, very drunk and dismissive of her dead relative. As the opening scene becomes more absurd, the viewer might expect a comically surreal progression for the film beyond. However, as details of Fred’s abusive influence and misogyny start to be teased out in the narrative, the characters’ initially odd behaviours – the emotionless reactions, the drunkenness, and others to come later – begin to make sense.

“Nyoni’s feature is a slow-paced film but one with a unique and exacting grasp on tone.”

This subversion of the opening scene is one of the first examples of Nyoni’s deft construction of the film (she writes and directs here, as with much of her other work). The film’s tone continually shifts from this point with the opening as an example of deriving empathy and anger from a situationally absurd scene. This seriocomic dyad operates in the inverse as well. The wailing of family members at Fred’s funeral is outwardly an expression of deep grief, but the oddly exacerbated and performative nature starts to amplify its silliness and disingenuousness.

The title refers to a children’s show, recalled by Shula, which teases questions about a native African creature: the Guineafowl. These cutaway segments give hints based on its colours and behaviours, including a shrill warning when it sees a predator. As Shula and her female relatives gain awareness of the broader damage of Fred’s behaviour, the metaphor provided is bludgeoning but no less impactful. Nyoni is also perfectly capable of setting the tone more understatedly. As Shula considers the story of a relative relayed in a recorded video (which always cuts short of explicit details), the slight upward shot out of her car sparsely communicates a circular path she is following: lost in her thoughts about the story, not shocked into staticness, but going round in circles as Zambia bustles around her. When she discusses Fred with her father, his excuses and wilful obliviousness are apparent (“Do you want to dig up the corpse and confront it?”). The camera is distant, showcasing them in an intricate architecture of indoor mezzanines and balconies: a dense web of viewpoints without a visible path to where Shula frustratedly leaves the conversation.

“As Shula and her female relatives gain awareness of the broader damage of Fred’s behaviour, the metaphor provided is bludgeoning but no less impactful. Nyoni is also perfectly capable of setting the tone more understatedly.”

There is still room for humour – Shula undertakes at least a nine-point turn in a car at one stage – even if some of it is underscored by anger or frustration at the men in Shula’s community. One prominent sequence showcases the men’s banal domestic demands and patriarchal expectations of the women at the funeral.

Nyoni’s feature is a slow-paced film but one with a unique and exacting grasp on tone. As the film opens, it may seem as daft as a coot, but the powerful perspective of ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL is delivered with an eagle eye.