An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer 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 experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist 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 than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman 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 fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing 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, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
