A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
