An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
