Forgive the clumsy metaphor, but if the locations and events of a movie are akin to exhibits in a museum, the protagonist functions as a de facto tour guide. The displays are all open and ready for viewing, but it’s our central character who gives them definition and meaning, providing an entry point and some logistical clarity. That is unless they decline the responsibility, or, in the case of Shula (Susan Chardy), seem oblivious to their charge in the first place. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’s would-be centrifugal force isn’t keen on offering commentary, at least to those unable to listen with their eyes. Her world may be foreign to us, but no one would be rushing to play chaperone after walking a few paces in her shoes.

You wouldn’t guess it at first glance, driving into her introductory scene in a gaudy, bulbous get-up straight out of a Missy Elliott music video from the early 2000’s. The lights surrounding the deserted highway are just bright enough for Shula to see a man laying motionless in the middle of the road, identified as her uncle, Fred, with one quick, unceremonious glance. Help arrives with the rising sun, giving way to plans for an elongated mourning process that sees all manner of friends and family flock to the film’s Zambian setting to offer tears, condolences, and hungry mouths in need of sustenance. Despite partaking in all the chores and rituals that the gathering requires, Shula’s eyes remain dry, attracting the attention of testy community elders as well as the younger female generation, who share in her detached reaction to the moribund news.

Writer/director Rungano Nyoni is slow to elucidate the cause of their curious response, but that doesn’t mean she’s hiding the ball. The trepidatious expressions will be knowable to women from all over the world, marking a deplorable relatability that crosses international borders and has little trouble translating with American audiences. Only the grieving customs prove unfamiliar, but Nyoni’s fly-on-the-wall depiction of the days following Fred’s passing is loath to hold hands. While surely not crafted with stateside ticket sales in mind, the lack of clumsy exposition forces foreign viewers to lean in, intuiting meaning and following the stray wandering stare as if it’s the plot itself. For a film whose central concerns are dutiful observation and forging new lines of communication, the approach fits like a glove.

Which is not to say that it will work for everyone, even those with a taste for Nyoni’s preferred style of slow bore cinema. Perhaps hedging against our possible impatience, Fowl’s screenplay adds a few humorous flourishes, almost all deriving from the Comedy of Manners playbook. None threaten to blow the roof off, but even in their chosen minor key, it’s hard to buy into frivolity in a movie of such dire circumstances. They mostly serve to calcify what we’re already witnessing, a community built on the hard labor of the farer sex, and one eager to give out a free pass to any male in sight.

They’re awfully well insulated, and Fowl, like this year’s celluloid doppelgänger Sorry, Baby, is incisive in charting the effects of patriarchy on both sides of the gender divide. Believing women is only an effective strategy when their voices have an avenue to be heard, a pathway that our present global apparatus is hellbent on obscuring. Checks and balances skew decidedly in one direction, and while Nyoni is a champion of the vulnerable, she’s just as determined to expose all the cultural presumptions that swaddle perpetrators in safety. African procedures and formalities may be unique, but the movie’s 2025 time stamp posits, in no uncertain terms, that regionality is a largely moot point.

Given the constraints, it’s no mystery why Shula neglects to speak truth to power, but she does squawk it in the film’s vaguely magical realist finale. It comes after a pair of scenes that rip the bandage off of Guinea Fowl’s festering wound, the first pitting empathy and support against oblivious subjugation in a group of victims and caretakers, the second unfurling that compromise’s fallout for all to see. It’s a bracing tandem, especially the latter portion, loudly banging the closing gavel on a movie that’s otherwise populated by whispers. Shula’s vocal cords are finally ringing; now it’s time to heed her call.