A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither 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), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
