An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional 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 tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither 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 village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
