A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain 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 drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
