An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
