An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory 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 desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior 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.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
