An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
