An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance 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 attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
