An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
