An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
