An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
