A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, 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 belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
